Where’s the beef?

Regarding “Microsoft Research fights critics, targets innovation”: As a technology professional of more than 20 years, I get extremely aggravated at stories like yours that heap abundant praise on Microsoft for whatever reason (or excuse), but fail miserably to balance the articles with facts.

No one disputes the talent of Microsoft engineers, but where does all this brilliance manifest itself in product "innovation," improvements for reliability, security or scalability? You should have insisted that Microsoft PR people state exactly what innovations exist in Vista, XBox 360 or any other products that is not prior established science or stolen from someone else. The history books are strewn with "facts" of innovation taken by Microsoft from others and simply using the word "innovate" thousands of times in speeches does not change reality. Where are the innovations, spelled out clearly?

Wendell Anderson
Kimalcorp
Hardyston Township, N.J.

Question statistics

Regarding “Muni Wi-Fi not just another utility”: Thanks for this thought-provoking article. You raise good reasons that municipalities should examine their business plan very carefully. But I'd like to ask you not to accept statistics uncritically. As one example, your article states that, according to the Reason Foundation, “just 1% [of U.S. ZIP codes] had no competitors.” This is a great-sounding statistic, but it's meaningless. The granularity is too large because a ZIP code covers a lot of territory.

For example, the central village of my home ZIP code in northern New England is well served by DSL, cable and wireless broadband. But the remainder of the town is quite rural. That leaves not 1%, but about a quarter of households in our town with no competition or no broadband service at all.

I don't have any solutions for this. And I am certain that municipalities shouldn't rush in blindly, for all the reasons you cite. But please, let's not publish misleading statistics.

Rich Brown
Hanover, N.H.

Switch as protector

In “How much can a LAN switch protect your network?”, I noticed no mention of securing devices other than those that support 802.1x, no mention of multiple devices on the same port and no mention of Alcatel. These omissions are related.

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