Plenty of seismic shifts have rocked and reshaped IT in the past. Some big rumblings' epicenters had origins in an unstoppable technology shift; other fissures had nothing to do with PCs and servers. Consider the recent shocks: the Internet revolution and dotcom bust; Y2K and 9/11; the consumerization of IT; and the unstoppable broadband and mobile explosion.

Imagine a world in which Microsoft wasn't allowed to sell Windows or Word, no one could use a Blackberry, Intel's chips were taken off the market and every company that wanted to deploy Linux had to pay an exorbitant fee to an obscure software vendor.

The big news this week out of Redmondland was CEO Steve Ballmer's Cloud Manifesto at the University of Washington. Big Steve was explicit in his remarks: Microsoft is betting its future on cloud computing.

Google Desktop is a downloadable application that indexes items on your computer such as e-mail conversations, Microsoft Office documents, Web history, PDFs, music, images and video. The app then copies the items' content to your local cache, allowing you to search for any of these documents quicker than your computer's standard search function does.

It’s loved by millions and has risen from a small-time university social networking service to the biggest phenomenon on the Internet. It’s the phenomenon that is Facebook. Popularity, however, doesn’t come easy. With some 400 million unique home pages Facebook is pushing the boundaries of traditional Web application scalability and it’s not shy to admit that it has been achieved by leveraging open source software. We take a look at some of the slides presented by Facebook at this year's FOSDEM conference in Belgium.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

Windows 7 may have helped propel to record levels, but many enterprises are still slowly, carefully deploying the OS, if at all.

Every revolution results in winners and losers -- after the dust settles. During the revolution, chaos occurs as people attempt to discern if this is the real thing or just a minor rebellion. All parties put forward their positions, attempting to convince onlookers that theirs is the path forward. Meanwhile, established practices and institutions are disrupted and even overturned -- perhaps temporarily or maybe permanently. Eventually, the results shake out and it becomes clear which viewpoint prevails and becomes the new established practice -- and in its turn becomes the incumbent, ripe for disruption.

IT departments today have many well-defined responsibilities. But what about helping business users with not just the technical side but also the creative elements of their presentations?

Big Blue wants a piece of high-flying Apple, as well as a slice of the social networking craze. As Macworld Expo gets underway in San Francisco today, IBM unveiled enterprise-class social software for the iPhone and Mac.