If you were planning to create your own IT news portal, today is a good day to start because I have the perfect lead story for you.

Microsoft has announced that, come November this year, they won't license Windows 3.11 for embedded systems any more. So quickly, to your keyboard, oh my bloggers, write your incisive pieces about the ironies inherent in retiring a 15-year-old OS that is obsolete six or seven times over.

And commentators! Make haste to increase page views with your wise counter-arguments that Win3.11 is stable and runs on a minimal memory footprint and suffers not from graphical bloat and pointless features.

Industry veterans? Make sure you vie with each other to cite the most obsolete system still in use. Does your hairdresser book appointments with a dBASE IV database running DOS 3.3? Well my local garage still does all its stock inventory in CP/M. Yeah? My dentist's x-ray is controlled by a Vic 20. And so on.

Everyone wins.

The best part of this is that you can all engage in a pleasant afternoon of Microsoft-bashing or Microsoft-basher-bashing, with the complete assurance that your opinion has no relevance to anything at all.

Because the thing about embedded systems is that they are //embedded//. Who cares what they run or whether it is still licensed? Do you know what operating system the engine management in your car uses? Or your wireless router? Or your digital TV receiver?

No?

Thought not.