Debates over the future of Windows are flaring up everywhere while Google finally reaches out to partner with Salesforce.com

Debate over the Future Viability of Windows Heats Up
First there was a Gartner report that was highly critical of Microsoft's overall Windows strategy. Now there is a Forrester report less than a week later piling on with its own criticisms. Some folks think these reports are making a lot of hay over nothing while others seem to be finding a lot merit in both reports. In the meantime, there's been yet another shakeup on the Windows management team.

Salesforce.com Partners with Google
Two of the biggest names on software-as-a-service are pooling their efforts, which is a boon for Salesforce that can only spell trouble for Microsoft. But others say Google still has a long way to go before it's a force in the enterprise even as rumors of dalliance with Zoho.com persist. But if you want to get a peek at Google's data center locations, you might start here.

Microsoft's Mundie Says Parallelism is the Next Big Thing
There are a lot of benefits to moving forward on developing the next generation of parallel applications on multicore processors if we can only figure out how to make them consistently work. Of course, for that to happen people need to start thinking about how such systems might evolve.

Silverlight Adoption Set to Triple
Granted Microsoft is starting from relative scratch, but a tripling of the adoption of Microsoft's alternative to Adobe's Flash environment over the next 18 months shows a certain amount of momentum. In the meantime, the head of Evans Data that tracks all things related to developers says the world of application development is getting a whole lot more interactive thanks to Web 2.0.

CIO Salaries Rise for Sixth Year in a Row
This may only reflect the simple fact that as IT gets more strategic, the people leading the IT departments are getting paid better. Of course, not all CIOs are created equal as the people running IT at mid-market companies are a lot different from their enterprise brethren.

Citrix Weighs In on Virtualization as a Service
A few days after a startup called MokaFive launched a similar service Citrix comes out with a rival offering that will support all the major flavors of the virtual machines on the market. Elsewhere, Pano Logic expanded the wide area network support for its virtual machine offering for the desktop.

Storage Backup is Broken
That pretty much tops the list of the challenges facing the storage community in 2008. Replication and virtualization technologies may help but alas a lot of these technologies are still in their infancy.

The Seven Grand Challenges Facing IT
The folks at Gartner have compiled a list of the great challenges confronting IT but there seems to be little synergy with the most disruptive technologies of the moment.