I find it interesting that the organisation most likely to have the information does not list Microsoft as a supplier in the categories "operating systems" and "office productivity...". See http://www.buyingsolutions.gov.uk/services/Misc/ITGoods/Soft...
Hopefully the "opinion leaders" that read this article will have the the nous to pick the writer's argument apart in this very conservative article.
The point of the sub-title is made that open source software has won the argument largely thanks to dot com boom and especially by companies like Google. The major reason for this is the openess of the data formats in open source software. So far, so good.
The writer then warns of the danger of data lock-in by "Cloud computing" evidenced by the trivial example of moving you MySpace profile to FaceBook and then making a claim moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages.
I refute this as any/most "cloud" service providers will understand that data ownership and availability is a key buying decision. As always, moving from one app to another is a huge pain and has spawned an industry in itself. Data Migration/ETL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load, anyone?
I suspect that you represent a small (significant?) market segment as I have not seen many IT book titles or series that meet your requirements. O'Reilly have a series, "Essentials" that appear to have started off with this intention but later titles are bloated.
Who'se been a busy body then?
After getting over my disappointment that you can't help me write better (I need to write more to achieve that) and realising that this is a WordPress-centric spell+style+grammar checker, I had a quick look around and liked what I saw. Looking good, well done and good luck.
I'm sorry but I don't understand how a responsible bank, with no subprime holdings, can be "on the brink of bankruptcy" because their stock dropped 30%.
Please would you justify and/or provide some evidence for your claims that this is and economic war being waged. It seems to me, a briton with Zimbabwean friends whose tales back up those expressed in the article, that you are being misinformed.