Steve Richards: Microsoft

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Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:56:34 GMT

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http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/8/25/129522.html

Really good list of SharePoint resources

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 23:12:48 GMT

http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/08/08/2238.aspx

Superb article about the meaning of Open

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 22:53:40 GMT

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what's important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards. he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance. He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

Understanding Microsoft

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 12:11:51 GMT

A lot has been written about the history of Microsoft. This article reviews a new book that looks at Microsoft from the perspective of the changes that it has had to introduce and continues to push forward as a result of its legal difficulties and "evil empire" image. The full article is worth reading but here are a few of the more interesting quotes:

"They need to get the outside world to learn to accept them without thinking that there's something shady going on there all the time. That's a very long-term process," he said. "There's an awful lot of cynicism out there. No matter what Microsoft tries to do, nobody's going to turn around overnight and say, 'Well, we accept them now as good neighbors.' "

One of the best insights:

In simple terms, some of Microsoft's critics might characterize the ongoing changes as an effort to shift the outside perception of the company from "evil" to "good." But Slater said he doesn't see it that way.

"I don't think they were ever evil," he said. "I think they were unable, or unwilling, to curb the zeal that was always part of the Microsoft culture." He said the company seems to be starting to make the shift from "excessive zeal" to "reasonable zeal."

And the bottom line:

"Before the last couple of years, Microsoft never talked about these types of things," he said. "The idea was to be as competitive as possible, and that was it."

The power of the blog

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 11:34:50 GMT

The Radicati group recently published a report titled

"IBM Lotus & Microsoft--Corporate Messaging Market Analysis" (June 2004), available at www.radicati.com/reports/single.shtml.

Its a truly awful report, as many people have commented. It breaks all normal reporting rules:

It does not compare like with like
It commends Microsoft for the same things it criticises Lotus for
It does not provide its sources
It uses emotive language to commend Microsoft and Criticise lotus

I actually looked forward to reading it when I first heard it had come out because I had some concerns over Lotus Workplace and how Lotus Notes/Domino would transition to the new architecture. However the report was so biased I ended up feeling much more positive about Lotus than I had before. The basis for my change of view "IBM must be on to something with Workplace if such bad analysis is the only tool available to make Microsoft look good". I was also left even more uncertain over what Microsoft is up to with Exchange, as I have already blogged on here and here.

The last straw for me in this report was the criticism of IBM/Lotus over migration to Workplace and the commendation of Microsoft on the same issue, lets look at a few examples:

How seamless was the migration from Exchange 5.* to Exchange 200*, having just done a major project to do this the answer is NOT VERY, admittedly it was a pretty complex environment that we migrated, (with lots of consolidation and some Lotus Notes migration as well).
How easy is it to migrate from SharePoint Portal Server 1, using the Web Store to SharePoint Portal server 2003 using SQL Server. Impossible without significant loss of functionality.
How easy will it be for developers who used the Microsoft's Web Storage System, touted by MS as a "Notes Killer - ha ha ha", to a future version of Exchange based on SQL Server, (pretty near impossible probably, if Microsoft failed to do it themselves with SPS what hope does anyone else have!)
Who believes that the Migration from Exchange Public folders to some future SQL server based environment like Windows SharePoint Services is going to be seamless!

The bottom line is that Microsoft's record in document management and collaboration type technologies is appalling, with very little strategic continuity and even less product compatibility. Lotus's record is second to none.

I am guessing that the Radicati group wished they had never gone near this subject, it has damaged their credibility no end. What is interesting is the power of blogging in bringing this issue to the fore and brutally analysing this flawed work in public. If you want to read the gory details follow this trail:

http://sharedspaces.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/response_to_the.html

http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/07232004073204AMEBRFJL.htm

http://www.radicati.com/response.html

Eric Mack as always does a superb job of pulling the whole topic together in his blog

http://www.ericmackonline.com/emo/emonline.nsf/dx/dr-radicati-responds-sort-of

And IBM finally gets around to a formal response, which is the final nail in the coffin:

http://www.lotus.com/lotus/offering1.nsf/wdocs/c3b85eec9126b30885256ee4006c9003

Red Hat goes from strength to strength

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 22:05:51 GMT

I was talking with some senior guys from Red Hat last week about their potential move beyond platforms towards solutions. We were actually discussing collaboration solutions. There view at the time was that their focus was to take what was available in the Open Source community and productionise it. Its interesting therefore to see them release an application server. When you look at the potential though to address the collaboration market Red Hat would do well to consider packaging a solution for email, IM, document management etc. At the moment they ship the bits, but the bits don't make a solution. If you look at a previous post about Microsoft and their, "integrated innovation", marketting there is probably as much scope if not more to do the same thing in the Open Source world. Start thinking Solution guys, you seem to have Platforms and Component packaging fairly well sown up.

Connected car and other concepts

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 19:15:44 GMT

These video's are pretty good examples of some of Microsoft's integrated innovation ideas. Illustrated by the connected car concept

Open Solutions or Open Source?

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:01:53 GMT

Although not strictly contradictory, it makes for a nice title. This article is about one of Microsoft’s reactions to Open Source and one way in which it is delivering on its “integrated innovation”, marketing strategy.

The basic concept is that Microsoft takes a collection of their products, and applies them to the solution of a particular business need. They publish for free standard architectures, processes, templates etc. You can populate these architectures with some products of your own choice. In a way whilst this is not Open Source it’s a sort of Open Solution.

The concept is quite interesting to me because one of the challenges with Open Source software, due in the main to the way it is created, is how to build a coherent solution from the many different components, without some over-arching architectural vision. Where does this vision get created in the current Open Source development model? It happens within IBM, Red-hat and Novel etc and it probably happens in a proprietary way. Even if all of the source for the components in the architecture are Open, the architecture itself is likely to evolve in directions specific to the motivations of its creator and be effectively proprietary.

So I am left thinking should the emphasis shift from Open Source to Open Standards and Standard Architectures. Maybe this in the long run is more important. If the software that implements the standard happens to be Open Source then that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day possibly of only transient importance. In their own way, (Microsoft always do things their own way), Microsoft is giving us an example of Standard Architectures, implemented increasingly with Open Standards. Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s what got me thinking in this direction.

I'm not the only one who thinks multiple monitors are cool!

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:03:53 GMT

This video of Microsoft Reasearch into large screens and multiple monitor support, shows some of the cool things that you can start to do with all of that screen real-estate.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14162#14162

Productivity before elegance

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:28:45 GMT

In this article, webservicespipeline.com discusses the rate of adoption of .NET compared to J2EE. Its conclusions are quite suprising. It seems that the rate of .NET adoption continues to grow at quite a rate, and puts usage on a par or slightly greater than J2EE. It puts .NET success mainly down to increaded developer productivity and ease of deployment and management.

This is signifiacnt for three main reasons:

In the hard nosed business of IT software development, even with all of Microsoft's woes, when it comes down to making business decisions, many IT companies still seem to make decisions based on rational criteria, and long term strategy and architectural elegance or portability don't win out in many cases.
There is likely to be a lot of new software developed for the Windows platform
Mono is going to be a pretty important Open Source project

Microsoft and integration

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:32:33 GMT

I have thought for a long time that Microsoft don't make much use of their own software to build pre-integrated solutions for their customers, (unlike Oracle for example). They seem to have caught onto the idea at last, (not from listening to me though :-)). Anyway a few months ago they started to talk about solution accelerators, which are solutions built from sets of MS products with associated processes, procedures and best practices as well as custom systems integration. These solve particular business problems, like for example, the process of hiring new employees. There is also evidence that Microsoft is doing the same at the infrastructure level where the range of tools available to them is even richer, SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint etc. This is a good example:

Microsoft also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.
"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

The company also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.

"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

Microsoft's latest marketting phrase - Integrated innovation is starting to mean something. If you want to see more on this topic then enter "integrated innovation", into the search box on the left, include the quotes!

This is just so cool!

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:15:25 GMT

Microsoft research have come up with some really cool tools for capturing and manipulating whiteboard contents captured using low quality web cams. My whiteboard is right behind me, (so my web cam points right at it, so it would work just great, but the downloads are MS only. The best trick is it removes the person writing on the board from the image. Here are some of the key points:

Other systems use expensive cameras or dedicated electronic whiteboards. The Live Whiteboard system, developed at Microsoft Research by Zhengyou Zhang and Li-wei He, uses whatever whiteboard you already have. It only needs an inexpensive Web cam and some clever software.

Live Whiteboard doesn't just deliver a video stream of the whiteboard. The software takes out all the shadows and uneven surfaces that come through on a Web cam, and turns the whiteboard into an image that allows viewers to see the whiteboard notes. Through a series of image processing procedures, the originally captured image is first transformed into a rectangular bitmap to correct perspective distortion, and then color-enhanced to increase contrast, saturation, and to provide a clean uniform white background.

In addition, if the remote viewer wants to focus his attention only on the content, the system can take out the image of the person who is writing on the board. The remote viewer sees only the new content magically appearing, he never sees the person who is writing the content. This saves even more bandwidth.

The full news article can be found here, and the web site for the developer with more info and the research reports can be found here.

Office news

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 18:46:40 GMT

A new version of open office is available. The main improvements are:

Enhancements to the open-source productivity suite include support for PDF and XHTML exports and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to the OpenOffice Web site. The new release, for example, will support forms conversion within Word documents and import text document layouts with more fidelity. OpenOffice 1.1 also boasts enhanced support for mobile device formats such as Palm's AportisDoc, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

IBM has ideas of its own, taking a thinner approach with its WorkPlace products

A wild card in the Office wars is IBM, which plans to offer server-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality to buyers of its WebSphere portal. At the very least, that could allow large customers to negotiate better Microsoft Office pricing/licensing, observers said. (See IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office.)

The MS Office team are majoring on quality for their next release, does this imply major changes, requiring major testing, or just good practice?

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.
"We're trying to reduce the iteration of that cycle because it's extremely costly," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Group. "We want to use our development resources more effectively, yielding higher-quality code and not iterating what customers never see," he said.
The Office 12 team will rely on new tools, including Buddy Web, a system developers can use to privately share releases, according to the memo, from Eric Fox, Office development manager at Microsoft. Buddy Web had previously been used by the Outlook team.
In addition, the Office group will have access to Big Button, a system that gives developers easy access to the appropriate set of tests for their code.

Office 12, will not reply on Longhorn, not really a suprise, but its in print.

Microsoft knows it would be folly to leave the hundreds of millions of Windows XP and 2000 users out in the cold and force an upgrade to the shiny, new and radically different next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which is now expected to come out in 2007 or later. Office 12 initially was slated to ship with Longhorn, but the next-generation Windows platform slipped and Office didn't, according to one insider. "The Office team is disciplined. They nail down their feature set, set a schedule and usually hit it," the insider said.

Read all this in the context of my previous posts on Choosing an office suite

The five top objections to open-source

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:07:47 GMT

Computer World has an article on this topic, most of which has already been debated many times with simillar answers to the ones that CW gives. However I repeat the list here, because item 5 on the list is actually new to me:

Support availability
Functional limitations of the software
Software license terms
Rapid software release cycles
Package road maps or future plans

Items 1 to 4 are answered pretty well, and I don't think are a major concern now for most companies and the service offerings are developing at a rapid rate. However here is the answer to item 5:

Package road maps or future plans are important to most companies. Major vendors tend to heavily promote their road maps, even to the extent of publicizing future capabilities years in advance. Of course, there is no promise that any advertised feature will ever see the light of your computer display. Not all vendors publish such road maps, and some share them only with strategic accounts under nondisclosure agreements.
Some open-source groups publish road maps, and some do not. At times, the stated goal is to mimic the functionality of a commercial package, though when any particular feature will appear is anyone's guess. The best advice is to make decisions based on what you can see and touch. If a feature doesn't exist, assume it never will, even if it shows up on a road map or vendor presentation.
With all these potential drawbacks and pitfalls, why would anyone consider using an open-source package versus buying a proprietary product? Ultimately, it's not about cost, so forget all those total cost of ownership arguments. It's about value and free-market choices. With any software acquisition, evaluate needs, explore options and select the best fit. Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier. There may be additional risks, but the rewards can make it worthwhile.

I am not sure I agree with the conclusion that you should "Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier", in my eyes for many of the major Open Source development projects you are actually buying into a roadmap dictated by an asset thats owned by and will increasingly run the world. Imagine all of the different agendas that will need to be accomodated when Open Source gets that popular, and the challenges that will exist to stop it branching in a way that damages compatibility. Lots more on this topic to come I think, but thats the first thought that popped into my head at 1:00AM when I should really be in bed, but am not able to sleep because of the blasted Steroids I have to take, that give you insomnia!!

More loss of direction around Exchange?

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 23:51:57 GMT

Ed Brill makes a point in one of his posts about the woes of the Exchange Group in Microsoft, here is the guts of it:

It hasn't been a good few months for the Exchange product team at Microsoft. First the Outlook team ships an updated connector for Lotus Domino; then they dismantle their own roadmap; and now they are facing internal competition:

"Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don't need to have an Exchange Server if you're a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail."

Sort of confirms the feeling I got when I posted on a simillar topic a while back. Then I got a bit more encouraged when I posted this. lets hope for some clarity soon!

Amazing array of Windows Powered Devices

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 16:28:53 GMT

I was wondering a few weeks ago why the Tablet PC team were moved into the Mobile and Embedded Devices division in Microsoft. Then I saw this web page and the array of Tablet format devices and I realised why! Theres a very good write up of recent news from the Embedded developers conference here. More links to Windows powered devices can be found below:

Tablet PC
Pocket PC
Media Center PC
Smart picture frame
Portable Media Center
Smartphone
Windows Automotive
Gametrac gaming device
SPOT watch
Windows-powered cash register at store
iCEBOX kitchen PC and home controller

Office 12 and other key release dates

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:09:50 GMT

Some interesting roadmap data has been published at Tech-ED. Well perhaps more stunning than interesting. I posted previously that maybe Microsoft were loosing their nerve and pushing product to market rapidly through fear of loss of revenue, and that there strategic re-architecting of the main product lines was potentially being compromised. However these dates tell a different story:

The core foundation elements, i.e. Longhorn Client and SQL Server come first. Then Longhorn Server, then Exchange Kodiak, Office System 12 and SPSv3 in 2007-8. Hopefully a new version of WSS sits somewhere around 2005-6. This implies that Microsoft are planning something significant in Office System 12, and that the information management and collaboration story might actually start to come together with the next versions of Longhorn server, Exchange and SPS. There’s a jpeg of the roadmap slide available here.

Microsoft are planning to give me some details under NDA of this stuff quite soon, so I maybe able to confirm some of this speculation at a high level.

WIndows 2003 Server, anywhere access

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:36:45 GMT

It's TechED Europe this week and Microsoft have announced more details of the next release of Windows 2003 Server. The area of most interest to me is, "anywhere access", which Neowin reports on. Anywhere access enables users to use terminal services over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC), Outlook over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC) and also file shares from within corporate LANs over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC).

These are very interesting developments, the WTS capabilities removing one more advantage that Citrix has over Microsoft. The file share access is interesting, as file share access using WebDAV is already available I can only assume that this is CIFS access tunnelled over HTTPS, this would be a big improvement over WebDAV as it would support more applications, the properties dialog and other features not available today using DAV. I thought Outlook over HTTPS was already part of Exchange 2003 server, so I am not sure why this is included in a feature list for Windows 2003 server unless its actually provided by the OS or probably IIS rather than Exchange.

These HTTP access mechanisms are useful not just in providing internet access to corporate resources but also for corporates wishing to provide controlled access on their WAN for third parties, aquisitions or businesses in the process of being disposed of.

Open Document Formats - XML to you and me

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:49:58 GMT

This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it. here are some of the more important links.

The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised here the full report can be found here. One of the nice things about this report is that its been reviewed by Microsoft and Sun, and their comments on it, (at least those they made public), are also published. Tim Bray, a man with some credibility in this area, (now working for Sun), describes his meeting with the EC team here. John Udell writes up his views on the EC report here. Dare Obasanjo responds to Tim Bray here.

Then the thread starts to drift a bit, but Tim Bray also talks about his views on how the OpenOffice team have used XML, he is impressed! And a snippet on how Microsoft have used XML in Office 2003, he is less than impressed! Tim also talks about the use of custom schema’s and concludes they are not a good idea, (Microsoft implement them in Office 2003, OpenOffice don’t). Jean, (a MS employee), gives his point of view, Jean like Tim is also a member of the team that created XML.

It's when I see something like this that Microsoft really disappoints me!

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:31:18 GMT

I have just been sent details of this InfoPath web application by Microsoft. I should have been pleased, but I was very disappointed, not by InfoView which seems to be a great way of publishing an InfoPath form so that it can be completed using a web form, but because Microsoft did not ship it!

Microsoft would have got such a different reception and eliminated a lot of trust issues if InfoPath had been positioned as a web form designer, offline editor and aggregation tool, with a complementary web forms interface for those not able to take advantage of the native client. I can not believe that developed in parallel with the thick client developing the web client would have been that big a deal either.

Anyway Microsoft chose a different route and instead of being seen as producing a great innovative standards based product that demonstrated the best of rich and reach, they chose a route that exposed them to constant criticism over attempting to lock people into Office and Thick Client technologies!

Come on Microsoft examine everything you are planning from the perspective of those who are uneasy about your track record, I think it will be your best long term form of marketing!

Zealots

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:29:04 GMT

I get pretty frustrated around Zealots and there’s lots of them lurking around the IT blogs. I recently read a refreshing article by Jeff Dillon from Sun expressing similar views and it’s worth a read just to convince yourself that it’s possible to be passionate about Linux and Open-source in general and still leave room to admire something that Microsoft does. A while back a couple of people mentioned to me that I was perceived to be something of a Microsoft Zealot, well I found that quite amusing, you see my own perception is that I am familiar with Microsoft and Realistic about Microsoft’s role in the industry and like any reasonable person I admire some of Microsoft’s products, people and culture. Probably also like most reasonable people I dislike some of Microsoft’s products, and culture, and if I knew enough of them would probably dislike some of their people as well.

I hardly think this classifies me as a Zealot, but some people do mistake familiarity and realism for zealotry when it comes to Microsoft. Well I got to thinking why that is and came to the following conclusions:

Microsoft has had such a bad press recently that its not really in anyone’s interest to be seen as a Zealot even if you are one
Most reasonable people having read this bad press would find it difficult to be a zealot, at a push I guess one might admire the way Microsoft can recover from such legal embarrassment and technical and procedural neglect of issues like security.
Most people don’t really understand where Microsoft are going now, as Microsoft is talking only about long term vision and technical infrastructure. The products that will be built on this technical infrastructure that are going to deliver this vision are to a large extent still a mystery. So unless you are a real techy there’s not much to be a zealot about
Microsoft employees however are another matter, and continue to support and evangelise their company despite the above, which proves they must be doing something right on the culture front and maybe the product and technology front as well.

That said it’s likely that the absence of many real zealots outside of MS, means that realists like me are sort of the next tier down. Compare and contrast that however with Open Source Zealots though to see the real difference. Here we are talking Zealotry taken to the levels of the religious fanatic, and that means taken to the level where its impossible to trust anything they say or do because its not driven my a motive that most people can understand, i.e. not profit, customer satisfaction, personal satisfaction etc.

Of course I have nothing against open source software, I am not as familiar with it and realistically its not going to wipe Microsoft off the face of the earth during the next few years, but I have used and admired it for nearly two decades and watched it mature and become a real force in business and a force for good.

So I just wish the Zealots would lay off, that way we might see the reality more clearly and be able to trust what we read more often, this applies equally to the MS and Open Source guys. Let’s hear it for the realists!

More integration between WinFS and XML

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:52:03 GMT

Jon Udell of Infoworld says in his blog:

Meanwhile I've been working on a story about Longhorn, for which I had long and an extremely interesting interview with Quentin Clark, ~~the architect of~~ director of program management for WinFS. I'd like to transcribe the whole thing to post along with the story, when it runs, but the upshot is that Microsoft is planning more and better integration between WinFS and XML -- both in terms of data definition and query -- than I'd previously heard, which is welcome news

I'm pleased too because it means we are one step closer to the vision of WinFS that I have been talking about in my blog. Complementary and not competetive to the web.

He then goes on to talk about the different types of search experience:

It seems clear, though, that whatever can be accomplished by means of what I've come to call "managed metadata," we'll always want that Google effect to be happening in parallel. When asked about the Semantic Web and RDF at InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum, Sergey Brin said:
Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.

From my perspective, this isn't an either/or choice. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what people write and by helping people to write in ways that computers can understand. What's more, I'd like to construe "writing in ways that computers can understand" as a problem for which hybrid SQL/XML technology is a solution. When managed metadata exists, or can be acquired, purely relational query will be powerful. When metadata is implicitly present, for example in XML fragments, XPath and XQuery can leverage it. The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds. As I've mentioned before, by the way, Kingsley Idehen has been demonstrating this for several years.

I agree but I don't think its a suprise to anyone that "The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds" and its my understanding that that's what MS is trying to achieve with WinFS, but the trick is that they are capturing as much of that relational and XML information automatically or transparently as people go about working with their emails, contacts, calendars, office documents etc.

Rich Versus Reach - my perspective

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:04:44 GMT

The Rich versus Reach debate is raging in the blogsphere at the moment. The debate has been very healthy with less of the usual emotional clutter that clogs up most debates that touch on the future of Microsoft. I am an enterprise guy, with a complex home network as well, which gives me an interesting perspective so I thought it would good to pull some of the threads together.

The debate mainly started with a post by Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War it’s a good article at the start but then begins to lose its focus and starts to make some bold assertions which are hard to substantiate. These are partially rebutted by Olivier Travers in his post Microsoft Lost the API War? Not So Fast and more thoroughly by Robert in his post Seven Reasons Why the API War is Not Lost After All, which comes over a bit evangelistic but is still a good contribution to the debate. Robert introduces a new perspective for me on Avalon where he describes how it may be possible to download XAML directly from the web as an alternative UI experience to HTML but still accessing all of the same server side web services. Piva wraps up most of the discussion with a good summary. Finally there are a few less emotive discussions on the topic of Thick versus Thin which you might like to look at:

So what do I think about it all:

First let’s remember where the debate started which is that Microsoft has missed the boat again, and that the world will be a different place application wise by the time Microsoft finally ships Longhorn. The result Microsoft will have lost its platform advantage and all apps will be delivered to some platform neutral client. My comments:

Organisations, and individuals for that matter do not constantly upgrade their applications, nor do application vendors change platform rapidly. Whilst I have seen a huge number of web applications appear, many of these are new classes of applications that were only practical or economic to deliver via the web, were information delivery applications, or were reach interfaces that complemented the primary rich UI. In recent desktop refresh programmes I have been involved with Win32 applications have dominated and very few of these have had web equivalents that allowed us to ease the migration challenge.
In building Longhorn Microsoft appear to expect this to continue to hold true, hence they:
1. Are providing support for legacy applications
2. Providing UI services today, Winforms, that will still be there in Longhorn and in active use for 5 or so years
3. Expecting it to take 5-10 years before WinFX is considered the mainstream platform
4. I hope providing first class support for web applications and the ability for Longhorn to act as a web services client
5. I hope learning the lessons of the past, see later
I have debated here, my view of the Longhorn value proposition. It’s a lot more than just a platform for the delivery of applications. Longhorn will provide a rich set of UI services, communications services, data integration services etc that will enhance applications in ways that will be difficult to achieve with web apps alone.
There are a whole class of applications, (look at my PC as an example), that need a rich client. This does not of course mean a Windows client but it does mean that some form of rich platform will be around on the desktop for a long time. If this is Longhorn, and for many millions of desktops I guess it will be, then there is a good chance that applications will build on top of these services if there is a strong value proposition there. My feeling is that there will be a value proposition but that it will be a very long time coming for many applications. A lot depends on how much effort Microsoft make to ensure that Longhorn is appealing just with the applications that they supply or hardware vendors bundle with new PCs.
There is a lot of third party activity around thick clients, in the OS client space, (Linux and Windows), and in the application space with Java application platforms.
Personal computing is likely to see a resurgence, with personal information management, device integration, information aggregation from many different sources, news/change/subscription integration from many different sources. Some of this works well server side but some of it is just so much easier at the client side. I have talked a bit about what I want to see here
My hope is that Microsoft and others will make VERY sure that the problems we all face with thick clients and rich applications are largely resolved. With massive improvements in device deployment, device backup and personality restoration, operating system and application maintenance and application delivery needed as a minimum.
Information Bridge Framework gives some hints of the type of UI binding mechanisms we might see with Longhorn and how these can be driven by context that is maintained dynamically on the client based on what you do. I talked a little about IBF here.

Finally let me state my position:

I would like to see less emotion in the debate
Provided Microsoft make Longhorn a first class web client I have no problems with them
There will continue to be a variety of approaches to the delivery of applications, the market will decide based on features and TCO which approach suits which applications
It may be that Microsoft is on to something with their Integrated Innovation concept that will bring real compelling value, it may be something that only a company that sells an OS, Office Suite, Development tools, and application servers etc can see and make happen, good luck to them – Linux and IBM will keep them on their toes.
It maybe that Microsoft invented Integrated Innovation to protect their Client OS and Office suite revenues, in which case they are likely to be caught out in a big way fairly soon. I am debating this point in this blog entry
There are a lot of VERY smart people at Microsoft now, (a lot of them did not start at Microsoft), and they have a lot of money, enthusiasm and vision. Don’t under estimate them.
Microsoft are being extremely BOLD at the moment, they are facing a huge revenue hole over the next couple of years. They are undertaking a huge re-architecting of their platform and the applications that run on it. That boldness maybe born of arrogance, but I suspect not completely!

here is a recent blog entry that gives a fairly thhorough review of the original post by Joel.

Which Office Suite?

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:22:43 GMT

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process. I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.
I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in
Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange. That probably means 4-5 years from now!
But this is the trivial stuff. Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:
1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?
2. I also want to consider vision, MS has a vision for Office, What is that Vision?
3. How open is that vision, probably not very! Is the value proposition worth the lock-in? Is the ‘integrated innovation’ that Microsoft are fond of worth the lock-in
4. What’s the vision of the competition, for some of them is it to catch up with Office 97. For others it’s a complete reworking of the concept. So it’s important not to just ask the question can it do what office does!
5. Remember the vision is the important stuff, if the decision is 4-5 years away!

Maybe that all sounds a bit dry, so why do I think it’s so interesting:

Consider how many users of Office there are
Consider how much of Microsoft’s profits come from Office and how desperate MS are to keep that profit coming in, desperate people innovate!
Consider how important Office is to drive MS Operating system sales and how important OS sales are to MS profits, desperate times two!
Consider how desperate the competition is to break the MS Office Suite monopoly
Look at the last few versions of Office, basically a stagnant product, innovating sure, but within a straight jacket imposed by the fact that all of the core Office stuff is effectively done, and improvements are marginal.
All the real interesting stuff requires further client side, client server, peer to peer and device type to device type integration
Hence we see the push in the Office System areas, Mobility, WinFS.

So its integrated integration where the action is from Microsoft's perspective and they are pouring billions into it, how are the competition addressing integrated innovation, or do they have an alternative perspective. How do the differing approaches affect real enterprises and real users, (see this blog for the difference). Thats the question I want to answer!

As a twist the answer may not just depend on the type of person you are, but on the type of device you use. So maybe portable device users and especially tablet device users will have a more compelling reason to stick with MS because for these people the flexible input technologies, online/offiline experience, home/work integration, device integration etc are more important.

Some of the important links are listed below:

Advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML File Format Used by the StarOffice Office Suite

Migrating to StarOffice Software from Microsoft Office

Draft of OO Product Concept Document

Accepted OO Projects

Just getting the idea of smart clients, now we have smart documents

Sat, 29 May 2004 16:13:41 GMT

Joe describes the concept of a smart document:

A smart document is a document-based solution which provides a user with help information, auxiliary data, actions and custom tools that are pertinent to WHERE a user is in the document and that are presenteddynamically WHEN a user enters that region of the document.

Then describes the tools that Microsoft is working on to develop Smart Documents here

This is not an area that I know much about, but given the amount of time people spend authoring documents and forms, and the amount of times people get them wrong it looks important. Even more important when document content is tagged in XML and that tagged content can be mined, document content quality will need to increase and it sounds like Smart Document concepts are going to be key to driving that quality improvement.