A new pilot program for Office Genuine Advantage Notifications has gotten off to an inauspicious start and, what’s worse, at some point the nagware will no doubt be mandatory for all Office users, whether it actually benefits them or not. A Genuine Microsoft mistake. Tempting as it may be to stick with Windows XP and hold out for Windows 7, analyst house Forrester presents five reasons why enterprises should upgrade to Vista soon — including the fact that there are few viable alternatives. On the other side of the debate: 10 reasons IT can skip Vista and stay with XP. The storage industry is rethinking its approach to disk drives and the freshest example of that is Xiotech’s new Emprise arrays, which replace disks with Intelligent Storage Elements datapacs. But even though smart arrays may signal a storage shift, the technology comes with questions not yet asked, let alone answered. Amazon aims to make cloud computing appealing to businesses with a new pair of support options that guarantee response time, offer diagnostic tools and, Amazon hopes, will appease enterprises wary about the services’ reliability. 5 IT skills that won’t boost your salary. Neither dead nor completely useless just yet, these disciplines are well on their way to being considered a thing of the past.And I swear I’m not making this one up. In Geek week in review, Cringely rips on a video by Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band. Nope, that’s not a real band, but it is an internal Microsoft video. It does not, however, even attempt to explain why Bill Gates cannot stand to be alone in the room with Vista. Software Development