You have to like Bob Cringely – if nothing else, he is colorful and direct. So also in his latest column, with gems like

Apple is just Microsoft with a sense of style.

and

IBM is a disaster-in-the-making. Big Blue as a total enterprise is running primarily on customer inertia and clever advertising, which definitely isn’t enough.

His point is that IBM and Microsoft have increasingly obsolete business models which will be disrupted as Google comes along and basically organizes the Internet by slicing off the important part of the infrastructure package (that is, the one that is changing) and monetizing it by lots of small ads rather than large and rather opaque licensing and service contracts.

And there, of course, he has a point. Except, of course, that Microsoft and IBM have changed in response to external pressures before, and should by no means be counted out yet.

Fun, though. Interesting times.