If you've been following my blog for the past few weeks (or the blogs of Seth Levine or Brad Feld) you'll know that we've been struggling with many of the Microsoft technologies lately, namely Windows Vista.  Rather than go back through all my rants I'll cut to the chase, I am now seriously exploring other solutions outside of the Microsoft dynasty.

First up is my new MacBook Pro.  It should arrive tomorrow and I'm swearing to myself that while I'll put Vista on it I'm going to run only OS X for at least the first month.  And while I plan on putting Parallels on it too I'm not even going to use that unless I just must.  So if you are a Mac user or fan please please chime in with any pointers/software/suggestions/etc you may have for me - I'm going to need it!

But more than this I'm going to be looking into different backend technologies to see how realistic it would be to move away from the Microsoft machine.  So far I have Google Apps and Zimbra on my list to check out but I'm going to be 100% open to any suggestion or technology that I find so bring'em on.  I'm looking at this from the perspective of a startup company - a clean slate, blank piece of paper.  How would I build our IT infrastructure if they hired me right now.  Oh, and I'm going to be playing with SuSE Linux too, will be installing that for Brad soon to see what he thinks of it.

I'm going to be blogging about this experience along the way. You'll see a link up in my header called "IT Quest" so feel free to follow along and cheer me on!