Ten years ago this week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange reached its all-time peak of 5,048.52. It was the height of the dotcom boom, and thousands of developers were busy writing millions of lines of code for applications that would -- they hoped -- revolutionize computing and become mainstays of the Web. So where is all that code now?

Is Google the new Microsoft? Maybe -- but that's the wrong question. More to the point is this: Can Google avoid tripping over its own feet as it strives to make Android a serious mobile platform? As my trusty Magic Eight Ball used to say, "All signs point to no."

Companies and individuals implementing cloud computing these days are doing some things correctly and many other things incorrectly. Here are the top three mistakes I'm seeing and how you can avoid them.

Macs in the enterprise aren't just cheaper to manage -- they're a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. Keep in mind that Enterprise Desktop Alliance is a group of software developers who've bandied together to deploy and manage Macs in the enterprise. The group surveyed 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations.

By almost any measure, Cisco Systems is the biggest fish in the networking pond. Thanks to more than 130 acquisitions, a brisk pace of internal development, and a much-discussed new organizational structure that the company is using to attack a slew of new markets, Cisco's reach extends from the consumer to the enterprise and deep into service provider networks. The company offers everything from personal video cameras to high-end telepresence systems to set-top video boxes to, lately, servers for the data center, in addition to more traditional network gear like routers and switches.

This story is just too wild to ignore: It seems Newegg has quite a bit of old egg on its face this week after it shipped customers "counterfeit" Intel CPUs that were more like movie props than actual working electronics.

Last week, a Newegg customer ordered an Intel Core i7-920 CPU, which retails for $288.99 at the site. But what he got was more than a little different.

With the iPad presale beginning in just a few days, and the clock ticking down to the much-anticipated Apple tablet finally hitting the streets, HP launched a renewed campaign for its Slate tablet PC debuted at the 2010 CES by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

No computer runs perfectly forever. Somewhere along the line, something will go wrong. While each successive version of Windows has been that much more reliable and self-healing, that's never been an argument to forgo a good collection of software tools.

Dear Bob ...

How do I handle it when the boss wants me to be the bad guy?

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob offers guidance to an Advice Line reader who's on the job and surrounded by bad choices | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line newsletter. ]

In 2005, Florida was hit hard by hurricanes -- not quite as hard as New Orleans, but damage ran to several millions dollars. As a result, a nonprofit team of builders formed a disaster relief crew that's ready to go to work should the need arise in the future. They asked if I might help get their SharePoint implementation up and running. Since I'm not that great with a hammer, this was my way of lending a hand. But what I thought was a simple request turned into many hours adding users to Active Directory, configuring SharePoint pages, and configuring SharePoint permissions.

If you've followed the news of App Store rejections over the past couple years, you may have wondered what exactly is engraved upon the stone tablets that govern the terms of Apple's App Store and developing for the iPhone. The trouble is that we haven't been able to tell you, as the agreement itself contains terms that prohibit publicly discussing it. But on Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legally obtained and published a copy of the agreement for the first time.

Jim Thomas said no to Windows Vista -- but Windows 7 is an entirely different matter.

Thomas, CIO at Pella, says his IT team began beta testing Vista's successor a year ago as an upgrade path from Windows XP. By October, just two months after Windows 7 launched, the Pella, Iowa-based window and door manufacturer had 225 Windows 7 clients up and running -- and the feedback from both IT staff and users has been generally positive.

Many IT managers are not moving to the cloud due to security concerns. I suspect they're envisioning a group of Eastern Bloc hackers in a one-room apartment attacking their cloud providers and stealing their data. While I'm sure that does indeed go on, the true threat around cloud computing security issues are going to come from within the cloud.

The ongoing power crisis is taking its toll on large data center operators. According to a recent survey by Campos Research, most of these operators are expanding their facilities or build new ones -- and they're citing a lack of available power as the No. 1 cause. At the same time, these organizations report that their data centers are operating at an appallingly high average PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratio of 2.9.

I was talking to a good friend at Microsoft last week, telling him about the problems I've been having with SQL Server Management Objects (SMO). I uncovered a few bugs both last year and this year -- well, not everyone might consider them bugs, but they're inconsistencies at least, and I think a couple of them are bugs. Anyway, he asked me why I'm now beginning to find them, given that SMO has been around for so long. I thought for a minute and said, "It's all PowerShell's fault."

Google launched on Tuesday evening Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications.

The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap and Zoho.

Cross-platform interoperability vendor Mainsoft has announced today the beta of its Harmony software, which provides full access to Google Docs document libraries from within Outlook. The software was built using APIs from both Google Docs and SharePoint.

Developers of the Google-backed Android mobile application platform have released revision 3 of Android NDK (Native Development Kit), which complements Android SDK by enabling developers to build performance-critical portions of an application in native code.

Release of NDK r3 was noted in a posting on the Android Developer Blog on Monday.

EMC today announced an upgrade to the management software on its Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) arrays that will allow administrators to apply deduplication, thin provisioning and business continuity tools to data stored in VMware environments.

Two weeks ago, I essentially claimed that nearly every company I know is hacked -- and in many cases, thoroughly hacked. Although there's a bit of hyperbole in that statement, it isn't that far from reality. That statement, however, has led some readers to believe detecting hackers and preventing attacks is impossible. Nothing could be further from the truth.