My colleague Sean Michael Kerner touches on one heck of a shortcoming at Mozilla:

Why doesn't it do more to cross-promote its own projects?

Mozilla's rivals certainly don't share the same reluctance to aggressively cross-promote their products. Look at Microsoft, which hasn't been shy about the practice. And now, Apple is being widely chastised by Mozilla execs and much of the blogosphere -- that portion that cares, anyway -- for doing the same.

(The blogosphere, of course, largely overlooks the fact that Apple's been doing this sort of thing for ages, perhaps most recently with iTunes and QuickTime -- not to mention pushing Mac OS along with its hardware, in a larger sense.)

As many have rightly mentioned, Apple is far from the only company pursuing this kind of tactic. The use of an updating app to push out new wares, specifically, isn't new, either.

Which means it's Mozilla's responsibility to rethink its strategy, if it indeed finds recent moves like Apple's so threatening, as it seems to.

Why doesn't the group go to greater lengths to promote (as Sean suggested) Thunderbird alongside Mozilla? Both offer boatloads of related plugins and skins. And if you've already taken the plunge into an alternative browser, it seems likely that you're at least willing to consider a new e-mail client.

While we're at it -- why isn't Lightning or Sunbird seriously promoted with Thunderbird? One might think that at least some users moving to Thunderbird are seeking alternatives to Microsoft Outlook or other combined e-mail-and-calendaring apps. Why isn't Mozilla making it easier for its users to get the same functionality by pushing a calendar app or plugin with its e-mail application?

As rivals like Microsoft work to counter the progress it's made with Firefox, Mozilla may do well to consider that if it doesn't get its act into gear, it's going to have much more to worry about than merely Apple poaching its market share.

Wanted to say a bit more about datacenter energy costs and how little businesses understand about getting them in line.

Yes, we all know datacenter costs are growing out of control -- but businesses themselves are often to blame.

How did this sad state of affairs come to pass?

IBM's Steve Sams (who runs Big Blue's service to assist customers in revamping their datacenters) shared some of his ideas earlier today.

Reason #1: Poor IT management in the wake of aggressive growth by acquisition. Fast-consolidating industries often suffer from a fragmented or redundant datacenter strategies -- a case IBM's Sams said he often sees in financial services firms.

Reason #2: Running regional and business units independently -- which may make sense from a business standpoint, granted. But all too often, this also means a company fails to coordinate IT needs, again leading to a fragmented or redundant strategy. Finance and media companies often fall into this trap, Sams said.

Reason #3: Lack of CEO focus on IT needs -- despite a CIO's best efforts, datacenters continue to age (87 percent of datacenters were built before 2001, Sams said) and mission-critical components, frankly, break down. At the same time, needs grow and costs balloon.

Reason #4: Genuine ignorance by CFOs about datacenter energy costs. Sams described IBM clients who weren't breaking out datacenter energy expenses from overall facilities energy expenses. Consequently, CFOs had no idea that datacenters were sucking up a large portion (10 to 30 times the energy needed by general office space!) of their energy bills. Thus, they couldn't prioritize the datacenter for an energy- and cost-saving makeover.

(Sams said IBM five years ago undertook efforts to address this shortcoming in its own organization -- contributing to the company's ultimate savings of $1.5 billion in datacenter costs annually.)

In every case, a lack of a cohesive, business-wide datacenter strategy the culprits, aided and abetted by a dearth of actionable data on datacenter costs.

With most large companies utterly dependent on the datacenter, their very businesses are on the line. That's why it's perplexing why more haven't taken the obvious steps necessary to ensure a sensible datacenter strategy.

"CEOs really have not come to grips," Sams said.

Has yours?

My colleague Pedro Hernandez, who blogs about Green IT over at Enterprise IT Planet, and I sat down today with IBM's Steve Sams. Sams is VP of IBM's Global Site and Facilities Services, and the go-to guy when it comes to IBM customers seeking to cut datacenter costs.

And man, do businesses need to cut datacenter costs.

Recently, Commercial and Industrial Bank of China tapped Sams' group to refashion its datacenter strategy. The end result: The bank consolidated 38 datacenters (!) down to two, saving around $180 million annually.

Despite the widespread talk of "going green" -- IBM has its own massive "Big Green" initiative, for instance -- the need is not just about becoming more eco-conscious, Sams said: It's about implementing greater operational efficiency.

That's because companies are throwing money out the window due to poor space, server and environmental management.

This can lead to some truly bizarre situations.

For instance, businesses routinely allocate too much datacenter space to too many underutilized servers. (We're talking average Intel-based server utilization rates of around 5 percent.)

At the same time, Sams said enterprises are holding off on a third of all server-related decisions -- because they don't think they have enough space in the datacenter!

Other businesses are allocating unnecessarily huge portions of their datacenter expenses to power and environmental costs. One datacenter observed by Sams' team spent a piddling 28 cents of every dollar on running its servers: the rest went to keeping the lights on and the air cool.

Efficient? Hardly. There's plenty of room for improvement, which is one of the reasons why Sams' group is ranking in millions annually in helping companies rationalize their datacenters.

And some enterprises do get it: One of the best datacenters Sams' team saw had almost the inverse spending ratio as the example above. These guys should be an example to others.

Yet Sams said his group routinely encounters datacenter air conditioners that are cooling nothing; overly chilled server rooms; jury-rigged or dauntingly overbuilt and overcomplicated (and in both cases, accident-prone) datacenter designs -- and IT and company management largely ignorant of how far out of whack their cost structure has become.

More notes to come from our talk.

I get a fair amount of email -- on average between 1,000 to 2,500 emails a day. Most, as you might expect, are spam. (Not fan mail, alas.) As a result of this figure, and of years following the spam industry both as a journalist and as a vexed end user, I've become well-versed with a number of the popular spam-fighting tools out there.

I'm particularly fond of tools that leverage the so-called "wisdom of crowds" to help combat spam: services that judge a message's likelihood of being spam based on the number of recipients who have marked it as such. These approaches have been commercially available for perhaps a decade, and have often been integrated with other antispam approaches (checksum, Baysian -- still my favorite, and so on) at either the client or server level. Many ISPs integrate some form of these kinds of solutions at the server level without end users even knowing.

Not that it makes much difference: Most of us who have been on the Internet for some time knows that inevitably, the spam will find its way into your inbox.