Mel Beckman

Apple's App Store for its iPhone and other iOS devices is an unqualified success, blowing through the 10 billion downloads mark in January. Seeing the store grow from 500 apps to more than 400,000 in just three years, Apple decided to take the app store concept to the Mac this year, with its App Store feature in Mac OS X 10.6.6. That new sales venue is off to a fast start, with 1 million downloads in the first day. Although Apple has not released sales numbers for the Mac App Store, CEO Steve Jobs noted in his iPad 2 announcement that Apple has paid a total of $2 billion to developers across both stores. Apple's 30 percent share of that bounty amounts to a tidy $850 million.

That net income potential hasn't been lost on Apple's competitors. In the years since Apple's 2008 iPhone App Store launch, other mobile OS makers -- Google, HP, Microsoft, and Nokia -- have launched their own stores. All are reportedly profitable for their operators.

Today's data center managers are struggling to juggle the business demands of a more competitive marketplace with budget limitations imposed by a soft economy. They seek ways to reduce opex (operating expenses), and one of the fastest growing -- and often biggest -- data center operation expenses is power, consumed largely by servers and coolers.

Alas, some of the most effective energy-saving techniques require considerable upfront investment, with paybacks measured in years. But some oft-overlooked techniques cost next to nothing -- they're bypassed because they seem impractical or too radical. The eight power savings approaches here have all been tried and tested in actual data center environments, with demonstrated effectiveness. Some you can put to work immediately with little investment; others may require capital expenditures but offer faster payback than traditional IT capex (capital expenses) ROI.

Tablet computing is a decade-old technology, but one that lay buried since users rejected Microsoft's "heavy OS" approach a while back. A year ago, Apple's iPad resurrected the tablet computing concept, delivering a lightweight sheet of computational glass with a pleasant, responsive user interface and a blizzard of applications. Users love it, and now a barrage of wannabe tablets are flooding the marketplace. All do reasonably well at the four applications users access most: Web, e-mail, books, and media. And the half-million or so apps in the collective app stores of Apple, Android, and BlackBerry would seem to fill every conceivable mobile need.

But users, particularly business users, want more. They want to throw away their laptop computers, or at least drag them out less often. InfoWorld.com's Galen Gruman has proclaimed that these devices will become the main computing device for most workers, and recently one mobile device management company declared the laptop is dead, based on the meteoric increase in tablet offerings. The statement may be premature, given that Google's Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") OS has yet to appear commercially, and planned tablets from the likes of Hewlett-Packard and RIM depend on proprietary, unproven operating systems. Still, it's clear that huddled users are yearning to be laptop-free.

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Although most iPhone users seem satisfied with the smorgasbord of applications delivered by Apple's iPhone App Store, power users yearn for more. Copy and paste, video recording and streaming, Internet tethering, and content search are just a few features third-party developers have already delivered to users hungry enough to "jailbreak" their iPhones.

And though Apple's forthcoming 3.0 firmware update promises to deliver some power-use upgrades, jailbreaking should continue to push the iPhone's productivity envelope, especially as users increasingly demand the Holy Grail of smartphone power use: applications that run in the background.

The rise of the Mac in the enterprise is increasing because users are finding ever more ingenious ways to work with Apple's accommodating platform. A mid-2008 Yankee Group survey of 750 senior IT executives found nearly 80 percent have Macs onboard, up from 47 percent in 2006. Nearly a quarter of these have 30 or more Mac boxes. Usability features such as Safari browsing, iChat videoconferencing, FileVault encryption, Back To My Mac remote control, Spotlight search, and Time Machine backup were cited as primary user attractants.

You might think the Mac value proposition story has been told, but the reasons for Mac popularity are diverse and steadily increasing -- and not just with end-users.

The largest single type of security breach is the stolen or lost laptop, according to the Open Security Foundation, yet these computers are among the least protected of all IT assets. The costs of a data breach can be huge, including the loss of trade secrets, marketing plans, and other competitive information that could have long-term business damage, plus the immediate costs of having to notify people if their personal information was possibly at risk from the breach. Particularly in a recession, enterprise management can't afford to take these risks lightly.

There is a way for IT to protect those laptops and the confidential information they contain: encryption. Without the combination of password security and encryption, any halfway-competent hacker has no problem siphoning hard drive contents and putting it to nefarious use.