One of the more annoying qualities of the so-called blogosphere is the incessant, sophomoric carping about the so-called mainstream media, or “MSM.” Some bloggers are great and some big media companies suck, but blogging doesn’t replace good reporting, and good reporting requires, at least for the foreseeable future, mainstream media companies with the cash required to hire good reporters and underwrite their hunches and peregrinations. So it was a pleasure to see CNET, a pure online news organization that employs good reporters and editors as well as a number of good bloggers, break the news that Steve Jobs would today announce that Apple was shifting to Intel chips. That was a great scoop, and it provides cause for hope that the Internet can bring together the best qualities of the traditional MSM even as it spreads out into new forms of info gathering and dumping.

“We will be a consolidator in this industry.” So declared Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in announcing, with his customary (if not always warranted) brio, that his firm will cough up $4.1 billion – half its cash reserve – to buy StorageTek. Sun’s move follows similar thrusts into the storage market by archrivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard. All three companies are trying to position themselves as IT utilities, and that requires an ability to weave together storage, processing and software in order to provide an efficient, tightly integrated IT infrastructure. The immediate goal, as McNealy put it, is to help companies “rationalize” their data centers. The longer term goal is to render those privately owned data centers obsolete. As the battle over control of the corporate IT infrastructure heats up, some of the fiercest fighting will no doubt take place in the field of data storage.

Becky Blalock, CIO of Southern Company, the big Atlanta-based electric utility, suffers no delusions of grandeur about her role. “This company is not in the IT business, so we’ll always be a stepchild here,” she tells Richard Pastore of CIO Magazine. That no-nonsense attitude says a lot about Southern’s success in doing what many companies are afraid to do: charging IT costs back to individual business units. Blalock and her predecessor Tom Fanning have been fine-tuning their chargeback system for seven years, and the results, writes Pastore, “have been transformative.” IT costs have fallen substantially, while user satisfaction with the IT department has jumped to 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5. Most important, business managers now have the precise cost data they need to make smart decisions about IT investments. And the company as a whole is in a position to make rational decisions about what to outsource and what to keep inside. This is a case study that any IT manager will find well worth reading – and maybe even emulating.