From the Test Center: In the second installment of his review series, Tom Yager examines seven serious phones for real mobile professionals. “The iPhone is wonderful for well-heeled consumers and status-conscious gadget freaks, but business users need more … much more,” Yager kicks off Supersmart phones for extreme mobility. So what makes a great enterprise handset? For starters, “it must be highly configurable to match infrastructure and potentially to adapt to changes in geography or work assignment.” And that’s just the beginning. Gripe Line: The Web is increasingly becoming, and not for the better, a one-way information highway. Consider those vendor sites that collect personal data but don’t give much in return. “Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes – many of them deliberately put there?” one reader poses. “Lately, I have been noticing many companies, even those trying to sell Internet goods, with no contact e-mail addresses! If you call the phone number, you get the voice recorder. If you send an e-mail blindly to say ‘support@widget.com’, you get an automated email directing you back to the website that bumfuzzled you in the first place.”Quoteworthy: My personal feeling is Microsoft has time. ODF [Open Document Format], its open source rival, is still in its nascent stage. Given even a year’s head start over OOXML, ODF will have an uphill struggle, to understate the size of the battle, before it is ever able to seriously challenge the huge Microsoft Office installed base. — Ephraim Schwartz, ISO rejects Microsoft’s OOXML but the battle is far from over. Gripe Line: The Web is increasingly becoming, and not for the better, a one-way information highway. Consider those vendors sites that collect information but don’t give much in return. “Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes – many of them deliberately put there?” one reader poses. “Lately, I have been noticing many companies, even those trying to sell Internet goods, with no contact e-mail addresses! If you call the phone number, you get the voice recorder. If you send an e-mail blindly to say ‘support@widget.com’, you get an automated email directing you back to the website that bumfuzzled you in the first place.”Careers: There is a difference between objectives and management objectives. Bob Lewis explains just that in the most recent Advice Line. Lewis breaks them up into ‘objectives’ and ‘goals’ for clarity’s sake. “It’s the difference between describing what will actually happen (goals) and what the business will achieve as a result (objective).” Of course, that approach does not work everywhere. “There’s a type of dysfunctional company — where everyone ‘hides behind the herd’ — where knowing whether you’ve succeeded or failed is that last thing anyone would want to do.” Technology Industry