Wow! It's hot as Dell in here! Does anyone smell baked Apples? Sony, yet so far away...

Puns aside (or asides with puns...), the IT world has recently been aglow with news regarding batteries that apparently burst into flames, potentially causing injury. What hasn't been covered so well is the types of issues that can cause this to happen.

As IT system users, we demand a great deal from the systems we use, to the extent that, if we had such a thing (let's tentatively call it the 'what have you done for me today' law - WHYDoFMeT Law), our expectations of our machines' performance gains far exceed Moore's Law. We find larger files to store on smaller machines, and we seem to be driven to carry terabytes in a teaspoon.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and that is the rub. We demand smaller, cheaper and faster, forgetting the unofficial engineering principle that you can pick any two and get them safely. I don't know the degree of engineering and testing that went into the batteries that have been burning, but I do know that the prices of laptops have been going down, and their speeds have been going up, so the additional demand of being smaller introduces a risk into the system.

When the smoke clears, and all financial costs have been counted, how much cheaper were all those laptops? Not much, if any at all. This is again a case of "can" outpacing "should". I am a fan of performance, but proven performance, not short-term performance. I hope that the industry re-thinks the pace with which they are driving into the future and applies more sound engineering practices to ensure that the components can support the assembly.

In addition, I'd like to posit that one or two more mistakes of this magnitude by Sony (let's not forget the other one within the past year - the spyware on the CD's from their music division) will leave them primed for a buy-out, or for a fade-out, from the environment. There are some interesting possibilities for sure.