As of Monday, April 10th, 2006, Phil Town will no longer be responding to direct emails from his Gmail account. Each Monday, Phil will answer a randomly selected homework or question submitted to his site RuleOneInvestor.com. I’ve much appreciated Phil’s help these last few months and wish him well in his endeavors.

John Rhodes over at WebWord.com recently wrote an article on How Web 2.0 Killed Microsoft. The article points out a lot of the hurdles and challenges facing Microsoft as they try to keep up with the movement from desktop-based applications to online services. It’s a long article; here are some highlights:

The disruption afoot in the world of operating systems isn’t tied to the software resident on your own computer. Instead, the disruption is network enabled software, particularly software, data storage, and end user environments that reside squarely on the internet, but probably more specifically on the web. To be quite blunt about this, Google doesn’t give a damn if a web browser of any virtually flavor is running any particular operating system. The network is the computer, after all.

Web 2.0 developers are mostly yawning about Vista because they don’t need it. Like me, I’ll bet you haven’t seen much buzz on Vista coming from developers and designers. In the past, developers needed to care about the operating system, but no more. They obey few corporate masters because they feel liberated. They leash of Windows has been cast off.

As users adopt more and more Web 2.0 tools, they will get more comfortable with them. In turn, they will start to expect and even need these applications in their organizations. The enterprise will start to focus on web applications more and the operating system even less. To put this another way, Google and many other companies playing the Web 2.0 world, will slowly kill Microsoft. The mightly enterprise will move to align with user demands over time. It’ll be a glacial move, but it will happen as Web 2.0 continuosly demonstrates victory, and liberation.

Read on for my response.

The carnivals of investing and personal finance are up.

4/3/2006 Carnival of Investing (representing IG: Jason’s Review of Jim Cramer’s Real Money)
4/3/2006 Carnival of Personal Finance (representing IG: Frank’s Article on IRAs and HSAs)

You can see a list of past week’s carnivals at the Blog Carnival site.