Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think about thatoften when one of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers asks me to explain how something works, or why it didn't work. The reality is that any explanation I offer will be no better than just saying "Abracadabra!" Any more I don't even know how much of this stuff works well enough to explain it.

This morning I visited one of my IT support services customers for our quarterly business review. I started by asking about her new (first) grandchild. Now I expected she'd whip out one of those little packets from the photo shop filled with 30 or so prints of the new baby. Instead, she pulls up a website and launches a photo show (set to music) of her new granddaughter. She did it as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do. It was magic.

Later, she showed me a website where she should be able to download a document but it didn't work. The site popped up a little window with a warning about downloading the file. We clicked to download the file and nothing happened. Why not? Sometimes the magic isn't strong enough.