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The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist. At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1. Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.

simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft's attempt to turn operating system and proprietary services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It's the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It's bold, brilliant and downright scary. Microsoft has identified the right problem, synchronization, but applied a self-serving solution.

The services platform doesn't seek to keep the Web as the hub, but replace it with something else. The white paper is wonderfully misleading, by implying that Microsoft supports the Web as the hub. Live Mesh is the hub.

Live Mesh is competitively important to Microsoft because of companies like Google, whose services shift computational and informational relevancy from desktop software to the Web. But there is something missing as data spreads out across the Web platform to millions of devices: simple synchronization.

“Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent. A given application can use different data. An application can run on a desktop or in my browser, it’s my agent. It can access all the data, which I can use and everything’s much more seamless and much more powerful because you get this integration. The same application has access to data from all over the place.”

CEO Shantanu Narayan described AIR as Adobe's "fourth platform," positioning it as the next link in the chain that includes PostScript, Acrobat's PDF (Portable Document Format) and Flash. The first three created disruptive paradigm shifts in their respective fields -- typesetting and document printing, electronic document interchange and web interactivity -- and all have generated significant revenue for Adobe. Adobe hopes AIR will follow suit

Cloud providers and mainstay enterprise software vendors could make sweeter WOA plus SOA music together. They may not have a choice. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, there will be a huge push for Microsoft Oriented Architecture that will double-down on “software plus services.” And MSFT combined with Yahoo would have an awful lot in place to work from — from the device and PC client, to the server farm, business applications, developer tools and communities, and ramp-up of global cloud/content/user metadata resources. I think Microsoft already understands the power of WOA plus SOA.

The cloud that can manage data in way that allows both user-level and process-level access, with granular permissioning — and allows CXOs to feel good about it all — gets the gold ring. The cloud business is a 50-year business.

The international, non-profit European Committee for Interoperable Systems ("a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors"[50]) fears that with Silverlight Microsoft aims to introduce content on the web that can only be accessed from the Windows platform. They argue that use of XAML in Silverlight is positioned to replace the cross-platform HTML standard. Effectively, if Silverlight usage becomes widespread enough, users will risk having to purchase Microsoft products to access web content[51]. California and several other U.S. states also have asked a District Judge to extend most of Microsoft's antitrust case settlement for another five years,[52] citing "a number of concerns, including the fear that Microsoft could use the next version of Windows to 'tilt the playing field' toward Silverlight, its new Adobe Flash competitor," says a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. Microsoft has also been criticized for not using the Scalable Vector Graphics standard for Silverlight, which, according to Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, is consistent with Microsoft's ignoring of open standards in other products, as well.[53] However, according to David Betz, an independent .NET technologies specialist, Microsoft would have needed to alter the SVG specification to add .NET integration and UI constructs on top of SVG to make it suitable for scenarios Silverlight uses markup for (UI and vector markup, by default). Consequently, the "choice by Microsoft to use XAML over SVG, served to retain the SVG standard by not adding proprietary technology [to extend SVG]".[54]

CXF is really designed for high performance, kind of like a request-response style of interaction for one way, asynchronous messaging, and things like that. But it’s really designed for taking data in from a variety of transports and message formats, such as SOAP or just raw XML. If you bring in the Apache Yoko project, we have CORBA objects coming in off the wire. It basically processes them through the system as quickly as possible with very little memory and processing overhead. We can get it to the final destination of where that data is supposed to be, whether it’s off to another service or a user-developed code, whether it’s in JavaScript or JAX-WS/JAXB code. That’s the goal of what the CXF runtime is — just get that data into the form that the service needs, no matter where it came from and what format it came from in, and do that as quickly as possible.

the fascinating intersection of SOA and WOA — with on-premises services and cloud-based resources (including data) supporting ecologies of extended enterprises business processes

Creating federated relationships between private and public clouds and their services and resources requires more than just industry standards. It requires visibility and access, the type that comes from open source communities and open use licenses.

So, true, WOA, isn’t an architecture, it’s a webby style of apps and integration, of mashups and open APIs, of using REST and RIA clients, all from a variety of Internet sources. It’s integration as a service, too. These can all be composited, accessed and managed by an enterprise’s internal SOA, or not. The services can come from a cloud, public or private. Forrester says the growth curve for Enterprise 2.0 is steep, but I think it will be even steeper. These webby assets could just as well come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends for composited ecology services that support extended enterprise processes. The point is there’s no need to wait.

rapid ramp-up of services hybrids — of public/private clouds, services ecologies, internal and external hosting, social enterprise media tools, mashups in myriad forms, integration of services regardless of origins or types of aggregation. You can today begin a business online and scale it without an IT department, or an on-premises datacenter. You just can.

The fact is that the definitions of and distinctions between applications, platforms, services, tools, clouds, portals, integration, middleware are — all up for grabs. IT as a concept is up for grabs. The shifts in the software arena at that disruptive. It’s why Microsoft is seeking to buy Yahoo, and not Oracle.