Two recent Microsoft communiques have sent my Absurd-O-Meter off the scale.

First there’s the Microsoft ad imploring you to install Windows NT Workstation because it’s faster, more robust, and yada yada yada. What will you be upgrading from? Windows 95, of course, which I guess must be slower and more fragile.

Who writes this copy? News flash to Microsoft: You’re supposed to badmouth your competitors’ products, not your own.

Then there’s the new Palm PC, for which the company that once claimed ownership of the word “windows” borrowed “Palm” from a popular personal digital assistant. It’s going to run — I’m not making this up — a “stripped down version of Windows CE.”

Shows what I know. I thought Windows CE was the stripped down version. WinCE indeed.

To punish the perpetrators of this nonsense, this week we’ll discuss defenestration (OK, I’m reaching) strategies.

We can’t throw out Windows on the desktop. That really is too risky. Instead …

Microsoft has built its Windows NT Server strategy on Moore’s Law (which predicts that the bang-per-buck ratio will double every 18 months) and on the average CIO’s overall nervousness regarding Unix.

In the minds of most CIOs, NT is safer and easier to learn than Unix’s notorious grab-bag of in-joke commands and semi-compatible versions. It’s more versatile than NetWare, since it can act as both file and application server.

And, it doesn’t threaten MVS (now OS/390) because comparatively, it’s still a toy.

That’s fine with Bill Gates. With every iteration of Moore’s Law, NT can take over more of OS/390’s turf, even without Microsoft investing in product improvement.

But NT is, of course, far inferior to many of its head-to-head competitors, at least from the perspectives of performance and stability. Be honest. Isn’t there a part of you that wishes you could use Linux instead? Too bad you can’t take the risk.

Well, you can run part of your business on Linux with no risk at all. All you have to do is break free of the we-gotta-have-a-standard mentality and replace it with a what-standards-do-we-need mentality.

When it comes to Web servers you don’t need a standard operating system, because Web server software shields everyone from the OS. You can run your whole corporate Intranet on Linux (or Netware, or Solaris, or a different OS on every server) with no compatibility or integration worries. And since most of your NT alternatives can handle at least twice the processing load as NT on a given piece of hardware and are more stable besides, there’s a direct business benefit. (Truth in packaging department: In saying this I’m relying on reviews and the opinions of knowledgeable friends, not on direct experience.)

How about the dreaded cost of training? I’ll bet you have a few adventurous employees who’d be absolutely delighted to invest personal time learning Linux on their own, and some Netware hold-outs who’d be thrilled to extend that environment rather than have you phase it out despite its technical superiority.

Cost of administration? C’mon, these are Web servers. You don’t have thousands of logins to administer … and besides, Unix and Netware both have very strong tools for administration.

Okay, I hear you say, but what if Linux (or Netware, or whatever) vanishes from the landscape?

No problem. Simply install Cairo (it should ship by then) and copy the files. Since you’re dealing with true cross-platform standards, you’re safe.

Each platform decision you make has its own risk/reward dynamics. When you enforce a one-size-fits-all strategy you lose your ability to optimize.

The beauty of this defenestration strategy is that while your company benefits, you help preserve a diverse operating system marketplace.