Even while he was in college studying for a career in criminal justice, he found himself pulled toward technology, working for an IT outsourcing company to put himself through school. Four years ago, he came to ComputerSupport.com, where he’s now manager of customer support, and he has no plans to do anything else.

Liam’s work involves overseeing the company’s help desk and making sure that customer IT issues are always resolved within 30 minutes. That requires not just strong technical skills but also the ability to work with busy businesspeople so that technological problems don’t interfere with their work.

Beyond that, Liam meets regularly with ComputerSupport’s clients to strategize about ways they can improve their information systems. Using tickets that have been put in as guidelines, he’s able to make recommendations about areas for improvement within a given company—“how we can be proactive and kind of cut down the ticket volume,” he said.

Liam’s also responsible for making sure ComputerSupport employees who are stationed at clients’ offices stay in the loop with their coworkers at the main office. The company has daily meetings that the remote workers call in to, which help everyone learn from the work that others are doing. But, since the company tries to be a friendly place to work, Liam admitted the meetings usually involve some talk about the Celtics or the new blockbuster movie that everyone saw over the weekend.

Liam said one of the things that drew him to the company was the chance to get in on the ground floor of a fast-growing enterprise—“kind of experience the benefits, as well as the pains of a small start-up company,” he said.

When Liam’s not in the office, you can find him spending time with his nearly four-year-old son, talking superheroes, playing with action figures or heading off to the zoo.

“We’re never sitting still,” he said. “When I’m not here, that’s where my time is usually being allocated.”

According to an article written by Susan P. Crawford in the Yale Law Review, 85% of Americans live in an area where there is only one high speed internet provider. In 2006, the assets of Adelphia Communication, which went bankrupt, were divided amongst Comcast and Time Warner. That, combined with a regional monopolies which have been forming since 1997, according to then-President of Tele-Communications, Inc, Leo Hindery, has created a situation in which 70% of consumers live in an area in which there is no broadband competition. So it seems that the Woz is correct. We do, for the most part, live in an age in which telecommunication companies do not compete with each other. This is most troubling since, for the most part, they have achieved this through their own designs. We, the consumers, have paid the price, a highly inflated price. A study done by Hugh Thompson of Digital Home, suggested that the actual price of a gigabyte of data transferred is about 10 cents. On average, that is a 5,000 percent mark up.

This is a serious problem. By the FCC’s own admission, broadband access is important to the economic well-being of the United States. History will tell us that at a time when an essential product is controlled by a single company, quality goes down. I think the last thing that we need for the American economy is for a drop off in quality in any sector. A strangle hold on the Internet chokes freedom, from sending e-mail to communicating to holding our files on cloud hosting sites.

But what about other parts of your body? Well, there’s already a man with a camera for an eye. Check it out:

This is just the beginning. What will the future hold? Will we be all connected, each one of us a cloud host? I don’t know. Only time will tell.

Lying for personal gain is in and of itself wrong, but it would be naïve to say that this wouldn’t be a such a large issue if Yahoo wasn’t having such a rough year. Thompson has had an erratic record. He’s filed a lawsuit against Facebook for patent infringement. It’s an expensive suite that Yahoo will have a major uphill battle to win. He also ordered a mass layoff of over 2,000 employees. He claimed that, “are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require…” Being like Chainsaw Al, doesn’t make him very endearing.

Lying on your resume is nothing new. But everyone from IT consultants to morticians should understand the importance of truth. And if we can’t expect transparency and honesty from those at the top, like Thompson, why should they expect it from us?

Microsoft began its journey into the cloud over twenty years ago with its Exchange Service line. In all that time the software has been battle hardened and honed for enterprise purposes. Office 365 is a collection of all the Office Suite programs that you know, like Word and Powerpoint. These programs are then given sharing capabilities that allow them to communicate with the Cloud. These programs can also be used offline which is probably Office’s biggest advantage over Google. The downside is, as with most Microsoft programs, price. Office 365 comes in many forms and the version that contains the most useful tools like Sharepoint cost extra

Google Apps’ standard version is free. All that is required is a Google account. It offers is own versions of spreadsheets, presentations, and a word processor. One of its bigger strengths is its ability to mesh perfectly with the Android platform, giving it greater mobility with smart phone users. However, its all online and that comes with its own problems. Google Apps are a bit clunky and lack the polish that Office 365 has. There’s also an issue with ease of use. Office has been around a long time and has had much more time to be tested and rendered for users. Though it may take some getting used to, Google Apps can be accessed by anyone anywhere with an internet connection.

It would take a week and a hundred thousand words to go into detail about these two cloud services. There are hundreds of variables to consider when addressing a businesses cloud service needs. More information can be found by talking to your IT department or here.