Will consumers flock to Windows 7?

‘Cause it doesn’t look like businesses will:

6 in 10 companies Will Skip Windows 7

Usual PR stuff will ensue – claims that Windows 7 has the fastest adoption, adoption is on track with XP and Vista, blah blah

You mean Windows 7 won’t cure cancer?

Why OSS is a better option for the health industry, but probably won’t be adopted because of software lobby money. A report on the two different hospital systems:

This all changed in 2007 when Midland completed the installation of a health IT system. For the first time, all the different doctors involved in a patient’s care could work from the same chart, using electronic medical records, which drew data together in one place, ensuring that the information was not lost or garbled. The new system had dramatic effects. For instance, it prompted doctors to follow guidelines for preventing infection when dressing wounds or inserting IVs, which in turn caused infection rates to fall by 88 percent.

Things did not go so smoothly at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, which installed a computerized health system in 2002. Rather than a godsend, the new system turned out to be a disaster, largely because it made it harder for the doctors and nurses to do their jobs in emergency situations.

While many factors were no doubt at work, among the most crucial was a difference in the software installed by the two institutions. The system that Midland adopted is based on software originally written by doctors for doctors at the Veterans Health Administration, and it is what’s called “open source,” meaning the code can be read and modified by anyone and is freely available in the public domain rather than copyrighted by a corporation. For nearly thirty years, the VA software’s code has been continuously improved by a large and ever-growing community of collaborating, computer-minded health care professionals, at first within the VA and later at medical institutions around the world.

The software Children’s Hospital installed, by contrast, was the product of a private company called Cerner Corporation. It was designed by software engineers using locked, proprietary code that medical professionals were barred from seeing, let alone modifying. Unless they could persuade the vendor to do the work, they could no more adjust it than a Microsoft Office user can fine-tune Microsoft Word.

Duck. Ballmer just threw a chair. To be fair, if IBM is involved they’ll probably push for OSS while Accenture or others will just go along with whatever Microsoft’s pushes them.

Why Nokia needs to get out of the hardware business

It can’t out-cheap the cheap knock-offs from Asia:

“Nokia has a huge unit share but look at their share of profitability,” he says. “Those two curves are running in opposite directions for them.”

While the company’s rivals such as Apple, Palm and Research In Motion have been competing to get more airtime for their products, Nokia has chosen to be more low-key in its approach. The result has been that the average American consumer doesn’t really lust for a Nokia phone.

That’s in contrast to how the company’s products are perceived in some of the biggest cellphone markets: India, China and Europe. Nokia phones there have a cachet that is unimaginable for most U.S. consumers. “In many countries if you have a Nokia phone it says something good about you,” says Mace. “It says you are sophisticated, stylish and successful.” Not so in the U.S., where the company’s phones rank much lower in terms of their aspirational value. “Using a Nokia phone here mostly means I am offbeat and not always in a good way,” Mace says.

Nokia is used to changing business models and businesses – maybe its time for another transformation before they are forced into it.