Now Star Trek is a Corporate Strategy. Beam me up. Please!

One of the journalists I like to follow is John Dvorak from PC Magazine.

Opinionated? Yes. Been around long enough to smell the bullshit? Absolutely.

One of the pieces that he wrote that got my interest was one entitled Microsoft’s Wacky New Direction: Star Trek!

But this got me thinking about some of the more practical problems with Microsoft’s (Ballmer's) new idea and why its doomed to failure.

Imagine if you will, for a moment, an office populated with this technology. Hundreds of cube rats in an open plan office, stacked, racked and packed to extract every single dollar of value out of the insanely high rent they’re paying per square metre, all interacting with their computer by voice and having that same computer talk back to them.

In case you have any trouble imagining that go to a loud, busy bar.

Quite apart from the technical issues who would want to work in an environment like that, not the bar, the noise, we’d all love to work in a bar, not great for productivity but fantastic for staff morale.

You know, when you’ve got a CEO talking up stuff like this that Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble and that Ballmer recognises that he’s got a great big target painted on his forehead.

Good luck Steve. I think you’re going to need it.