Well, I'm not directly involved but our company manages Office 365 and Google Apps for other companies (we're an outsourced IT company). Microsoft has been very, very proactive on the ugprades sides. Even letting customers push their upgrades (moving from BPOS to O365) by six months or more. However, it remains to be seen how they'll do with O365. Also, O365 is server components only (SharePoint, Exchange, etc.). The client-side software you use with it Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. doesn't necessarily have to be upgraded at the same time or at all. for example you can use Office 2007 if you really want to.

What they're saying is your company chooses when the ugprades are done and can give employees a heads up. Not to mention how they publish betas, have a published roadmap, developer conferences, etc. etc. The other argument is that you only have to pay for Office once not on a month-to-month basis. Not to knock GoogleApps, but who's to say they don't raise the price next week?

I remember buying candies for a penny when I was a kid. When I take my kids to the candy store the smallest candies tend to be packages in ways where they cost about one dollar.

I'm not pro-Godday but I wouldn't be buying SSL certs from these namecheap guys if they use Comodo :
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/23/1957200/Phony-Web-Certs-Issued-For-Google-Yahoo-Skype

Would you?

Does namecheap only use Comodo as a CA?

Oh my, that is hilarious.

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find one. In fact we're spending much LESS as a PERCENTAGE of GDP/GNP then during WW2 and we're taking in even less taxes. I could cite a bunch of sources for this as it's a well-known fact, but here's a nice graph.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/government-spending-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-2/

Are you sure you're not confusing this with total revenue?

Wouldn't this same logic apply to an ISP and your computer? Should they be able to install a key logger on your computer to "diagnose" connection issues? Isn't a smart phone a computer with a phone?

In my experience Backup Exec is better than it ever was, especially for backing up VMs. We use it across maybe 100 servers and it works great. Granted, we have people who took the time to learn it and set it up properly. EMC Avamar is way better though and we're moving to that with a combination of Data Domain. I haven't used it, but some of the guys I work with swear by IBM's Tivoli.

All true. Most companies should retain financial and financial-related data for seven years for tax/audit reasons. This is even more true if they do business in more than one state.

It's a good idea to have end of year backups for audit purposes as financial systems are dynamic and change. The cost of a few tapes will easily outweigh the work and expense of trying to backtrack things (if it's even possible).