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Gary Edwards

Introducing Microsoft Online Services - 0 views

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    The MS Cloud has arrived!!!! Grab your ankles and kiss your ever lovin Open Web good-bye. This is a video describing how Microsoft Online Services can add value to your organization. Interestingly, the software-plus-service offerings from Microsoft are being marketed as a way for corporate IT to break free; reducing systems management cost and operation overhead while leveraging existing "rich client" systems. Meaning, MSOffice is now connected to the MS Cloud. The transition of legacy client/server systems to MS Cloud hosted client/Web-Stack /server systems can now begin. No doubt the recent ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML played no small part in this announcement!
Gary Edwards

OOXML/ODF: Just One Battlefield in a Much Bigger War | Brian Proffitt Linux Today - 0 views

  • Once in a while, a confluence of random events (or not so random, depending on your belief system) can create the ideal aha! moment. The moment of clarity when all the pieces just fall into place and you realize "that's what's going on!" I believe I have had one of those moments. And if this thought has any basis in reality, it could mean that everything we have seen in IT is about to make a huge change.
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    Brian figures out that the document wars are really about Cloud Computing. Big vendors IBM, Sun, Google and Microsoft are jockeyign for position in our cloud computing future. And this is why Microsoft MUSt get ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML! What Brian misses is the key to a Microsoft Cloud that can be found int he MSOffice SDK; the OOXML<>XAML conversion component. XAML, Silverlight and Smart Tags replace W3C XHTML-CSS, SVG-Flash, and RDF. Makign the MS Cloud one where Microsoft owned protocols, formats and .NET components dominate all processes. ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML establishes MSOffice as a standards "editor", thus masking the cloud computing shift to XAML. A shift that will lock out all other Web 2.0 - Cloud providers dependent on Open Web - W3C protocols and formats!
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    Note that Brian posted this article in February, on the eve of the Geneva BRM. Since then ISO has gone on to approve MSOffice-OOXML. Note also that, a week prior to this publication, i had sent Brian a lengthy discussion entitled "Windows can't do Cloud Computing", where all of these issues were discussed except for the IBM motivations. Not wanting to interfere with the upcoming Geneva BRM and vote, I had declined Brian's request to publish.
Paul Merrell

Microsoft releases Office 2008 SP1, says VBA to make return - 0 views

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    ""The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft. ... As part of its announcements Tuesday, the Mac BU also said it intends to bring VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac, but offered no timeframe for the update." According to the article, sales for MS Office 2008 for the Mac have tripled what MS Office 2004 accomplished. There's a bit of a wookie hidden in the claim because new Mac sales have far more than tripled since the comparable period following the release of Office 2004. So even though Microsoft Office gross sales on the Mac have increased from the period compared, there is a strong appearance that Microsoft is losing market share on the Mac, something I would be concerned about were I Steve Ballmer, not something to celebrate. Also note that the lack of VBA support in Office 2008 plus a few other Microsoft moves dealt Office for the Mac out of the Micrsooft cloud. Why Redmond might suddenly have a change of heart and deal Apple into the MS Cloud afer all is something not explained. But it is somewhat plausible that Microsoft feels the need to change its mind on VBA because it is losing market share on the Mac. My assessment? The VBA announcement is vaporware until proved otherwise, designed to slow the adoption of competing office software on the Mac, which makes the rapidly expanding OS X stack, e.g., now able to run Linux apps, a bigger threat to Windows. Microsoft is obviously losing Office market share on the Mac platform and OS X is eating Windows market share. Time for vaporware.
Gary Edwards

What's up at the OpenDocument Foundation? Linux.com - Wikipedia Link - 0 views

  • Re: Finally, the beef... Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 76.14.48.79] on November 12, 2007 11:32 PM XHTML + CSS is the base. Add XForms, SVG and SMiL where needed. Study the work being done on microformats. Like most modern portable XML file formats, the basic packages are those of content and presentation. In CDF speak, this is XHTML content and CSS as the portable presentation package. ODF and MS-OOXML both struggle with the legacy tradition of the presentation package being application specific. Meaning, the portability is limited to other applications that are either of the same version, or, share the same layout and rendering model so that the exchange of the presentation package is lossless.
    • Paul Merrell
       
      See also "Putting Andy Updegrove to Bed (without his supper)," http://www.universal-interop-council.org/node/4 for a thorough rebuttal of claims that the W3C Compound Document Formats and framework are not suitable for use in the office productivity software sector.
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    The Wikipedia "OpenDocument Foundation" page is continually re edited, changing the factual truth to portray the Foundation in the worst light possible. Every time we try to repair the page to reflect the truth, the liars jump right back in. Is there a Wikipedia resolution for liies? Our facts can be verified by the five year history of the OASIS membership and ODF TC records that are public information. This anonymous post to Joe Barr's Linux.com article is perhaps the best explanation on the Web of why the Foundation choose CDF, and could not use ODF.Good explanation of MSOffice-OOXML and the MS Web-Stack :: MS Cloud.No mention of the December 2007 MSOffice SDK beta that provided us with that first all important glimpse of the MSOffice-OOXML <> XAML converter component. I take it the article comment was written before that most important discovery. XAML "fixed/flow" is an alternative to W3C/ISO XHTML-CSS and ISO PDF.
Gary Edwards

Ozzie signals Microsoft's surrender to the cloud | Software as Services | ZDNet.com - 0 views

  • It’ll be cheaper to put apps in the cloud than to run them on your own servers: “It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom … Somebody who is selling [business] apps is going to build in, more than likely, the underlying utility costs within their higher-level service. It will still be cheaper to do those things on a service infrastructure than it is on a server infrastructure.” Taken together, these statements — by the company’s chief strategy officer, no less — add up to a huge strategic shift under way within Microsoft. They suggest that, in five years’ time, the company will be unrecognizable compared to today, with services revenues taking a significant share while licence revenues dwindle.
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    Phil Wainwright comments on Ray Ozzie statements concerning the Microsoft Cloud Strategy. Phil of course thinks MS is in trouble.
Gary Edwards

Has Microsoft lost its way on desktop computing? | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com - 0 views

  • OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future. RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge. A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?
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    ZDNet's David Morgenstern must have missed ISO approval of OOXML! MS has a desktop strategy, but involves proprietary protocols, formats and API's as the protective barrier for transitioning desktop bound client/server business processes to MS Web Stack bound SaaS-SOA business processes. Welcome to the Microsoft Cloud!
Gary Edwards

The Mesh lives but the cloud Office is vaporous | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com - 0 views

  • Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of "personal productivity" into the realm of the "inter-personal" through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.
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    I don't think Dan Farber gets it. ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML establishes MSOffice as a standards compliant web/cloud/WOA "editor" for client/Web-Stack/server systems. No need to try to squeeze all tha tcomplexity into a browser. Just use the MSOffice SDK OOXML <> XAML conversion component to convert rich, business process loaded, documents to a web ready format. OH my, XAML is proprietary and IE-8 does not support XHTML2, CSS3, SVG, XForms, RDF, SPARQL, SWF, PDF or JavaScript. Bummer. ISO has done the unthinkable and Microsoft can now break the web without worry of anti trust retribution. They are after all, simply implementing an open standard.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Says Yes With Mesh While Google Waits On Officenomics - 0 views

  • Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows. Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.
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    Techcrunch review of a recent Gilmore Group interview with MS Live Mesh product manager
Gary Edwards

Live Mesh: Windows Becomes the Web | Microsoft Watch - Web Services & Browser - - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • This mesh of services compromises the overlaying platform, which is supported by proprietary Microsoft APIs.
  • APIs, desktop software and Mesh run-time take on real importance. Users must install Live Mesh software on their PC, which includes the synchronization run-time and makes extension changes to Windows Explorer.
  • Microsoft's broader Mesh vision extends the operating system to cloud services. Microsoft's PR information refers to the "Mesh Operating Environment," which would presumably grant end users access to applications anytime, anywhere and on anything. Access includes the Web browser, provided it's from Live Desktop. End users would designate devices in their Mesh that would be permitted to run applications. And, yes, it does foreshadow hosted applications as well as those accessed from a Mesh-designated PC.
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    Joe Wilcox takes on MS "Live Mesh" in a series of articles. Clearly he gets it but one has to wonder about the rest of the techno crowd.
Gary Edwards

Live Mesh: Microsoft hews to open standards rule | John Carroll | ZDNet.com - 0 views

  • Live Mesh is supposed to be a common framework to enable cross-device interoperability. It also includes a bunch of shared services that can be used from any Mesh-compatible device, such as network storage space and photo-sharing services, among others (others likely include many of the “Live” properties) . This makes sense given the direction that the world is moving in, with an ever-growing proliferation of computing devices both on one’s person and within the home that, currently, are too much like islands of processing power. A true mesh platform that standardized cross-device communication and synchronization in the same way HTML / CSS / Javascript has standardized user interfaces on the web would surely be a step forward from an IT evolutionary standpoint. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip, but I think the use of the term “standard” was the essential part of the previous sentence. Microsoft won’t get anywhere if they tried to peddle a closed-protocol environment to developers in 2008.
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    I saw Live-Mesh today at the Web 2.0 Expo. It's still flashware, but very cool flashware. (Or is that "silverware" :) If they get this right the web will belong to Microsoft. I disagree with John that mesh will be standards base. Yes, mesh will work with HTML/CSS amd MAYBE JavaScript. But it will also work with the prorietary XAML, Silverlight, Smart Tags - LINQ. All of which are proprietary alternatives to what mesh won't support :: the advanced format standards from the W3C - XHTML, CSS3, SVG, XForms, CDF, RDF, RDFa and SPARQL. Live-Mesh will break the open web just s surely as the MSOffice SDK OOXML <> XAML conversion component will break the open web future into a Google consumer web, and a Microsoft business web.
Gary Edwards

Ten things to know about Microsoft's Live Mesh | Mary Jo | ZDNet.com - 0 views

  • Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration
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    Microsoft introduces Live-Mesh, and Mary Jo runs through the ten things that caught her attention.
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