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When Windows has a real rival, Microsoft has real problems. As Blodget notes, there are caveats: The unofficial Office monopoly should give Microsoft breathing room for a few more years. But even that could be threatened as Google's more-affordable Web applications improve. This storm has been gathering for years. In 2005, we wrote a piece at News.com about Google's longterm threat to Microsoft. The impetus was a major management shuffle at MSN, but we had fun pulling out some old Microsoft memos about now-defunct Netscape in the early days of the World Wide Web. My favorite was a note written in 1995 by Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka describing a "nightmare" scenario for his company. "The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote. Microsoft didn't pay too much attention to the warning. Ten years later, another internal memo put a name to that nightmare--Google. Now Blodget has advanced that nightmare scenario a few more steps with his analysis.

Collaboration is about problem solving in the flow of business processes - or at least it should be. That’s where cost sits and where all the automation in the world will not rescue the business manager. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t solve problems per se but it may serve to expose them. The question then comes, how does business go about solving the problems it has discovered? In many cases, this comes down to one of several things.

Forrester has missed a trick. It has fallen into the evolutionary trap of assuming that existing processes will accommodate the new world of socially networked operations. If anything, the adoption of these technology solutions will raise the specter of how business process designed to release value is articulated through software. That alone could kill off many an otherwise worthy project as business managers stop to rethink what they need to build in order to solve the real problems of the day. Collaboration will go some distance, but without a fast track way of implementing BRP, it will represent a lot of wasted effort.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0. It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.