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A little-known project called Lively Kernel at Sun's research labs simplifies the way Web programming is created. Lively is a JavaScript engine that uses scalable vector graphics (SVG) to render images, animation and text on a Web browser. What's most exciting about the Lively stack is that eliminates the need for HTML, document object model (DOM) and style sheet (CSS) programming.

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.

The Microsoft Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) technical documentation set provides preliminary technical specifications for this language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) that enables developers to specify a hierarchy of objects.

Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years: GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICEQuarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008 Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office. And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember: Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.

The "Windows monopoly+Office monopoly=Microsoft" story was absolutely true 10 years ago, but less so now. 1. It looks as if the "Office" revenue figures are coming from MSFT's reported revenues in the Business segment. That's not all Office. Based on what they've said at the last few Financial Analyst Meetings, Exchange is approaching $2B/year, SharePoint is about $1B/year, and Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) is more than $1B per year. I also know that Project has been a $1B/year business for a long time (believe it or not), and products such as Comms Server and Visio contribute around $500m/year. Margins on all these products are lower than on Office, but most (not Comms Server) are profitable. 2. In addition to all the non-Office products that compose its Business segment as mentioned above, the Server and Tools business (Windows Server, SQL Server) is profitable (30% margins) and growing revenues average of 15% for the last six years. Not monopoly, but a good business. Look at all these stats together, and seems like they should get out of search and advertising and sell off (or scale back to maintenance mode) most of the consumer online sites, focusing instead on hosted business apps--they're already doing it with Exchange and SharePoint, why not Office? If somebody's going to canniblize their "real" business, it might as well be them.

Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration

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.

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.