In-the-Clouds-with-SOA-XML-and-the-Open-Web

More confusion about the MS announcement of native support for ODF, with delayed support for whatever ISO finally determines to be ISO 29500; "OOXML". Damn but these guys are all twisted up about this. The truth is, ISO National Bodies traded their vote in favor of OOXML for MSOffice support for ODF and Microsoft's joining the OASIS ODF TC. It's not complicated. MS wants ISO approval of OOXML because it established MSOffice as a "standards" editor. The rest of this kurfufull is all about anti trust concerns and Microsoft's need to put htose concerns to bed before the world figures out that they are leveraging the MS desktop monopoly into an MS Web monopoly. ISO approval of OOXML is the final piece of very complex puzzle. The harmonization of OOXML-ODF is impossible. MS knows this. So why not join OASIS ODF TC if it means putting aside the anti trust claims from ISO NB's and getting that all important standardization of OOXML? Both ODF and OOXML are both XML encodings of entirely application specific binary formats. There is no possible to way to reconcile the file formats without also reconciling the applications! Incuding feature sets and layout engines!!!! Impossible!! The real game is the transition from client/server to the emerging client/Web-Stack/server model. MS is the "client" in client/server. No way were they about to give that up without a plan to control the transition of MSOffice documents to the emerging client/Web-Stack/server model. They sought to fully control the formats, protocols and API's of this new model. ISO handed it to them. The thing to watch is the MSOffice SDK where one can find a very cool OOXML <> XAML converter. XAML is totally proprietary, but "web ready". Meaning, MSOffice is a "web ready" application. It's just that the web readiness is 100% MS .NET-Silverlight. The great transition to client/Web-Stack/server is now on. Thanks to ISO. All this ODF stuff is just background noise designed to quiet the anti t

great article walking through the history of HTML, XHTML, and browsers. Summary is that HTML5 is the future. Good thinking, great arguments.

IBM's Arnaud La Hors on why Microsoft should be blamed for what is inevitable given that ODF is not designed for interoperability and is not application-neutral. One might rationally fault Microsoft for not having joined the ODF TC earlier, but the ODF TC studiously avoided enabling interoperability even among ODF implementations and ODF has almost no mandatory conformity requirements, with application-specific extensions classified as conformant. The real ODF standard is the OOo code base controlled by Sun Microsystems. IBM played along with that game and cloned the OOo code base instead of fighting on the TC to make the myth of ODF interoperability come true. I don't see a lot of moral high ground for IBM here.

New version of the most advanced major W3C Compound Document Formats solution's basic edition. Licensed for non-profit and evaluation purposes only. If you are using the Blog Editor from earlier versions, note the warning.

Microsoft is leading the tech industry's charge up Capitol Hill, according to statistics released Monday. The world's largest software company spent $9 million on lobbyists to make its case in issues including taxes and trade, according to statistics compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda".

2006 MSDN white paper that is the best overview I've found thus far of the bridges Microsoft is building between Office 2007 and the Microsoft cloud. 12 pp. Somewhat dated in the intervening two years. Describes the Microsoft "line of business" vision for vertical markets in some detail. "This white paper introduces Office Business Applications (OBAs), a new breed of easily customizable solutions that address real-world business problems through the 2007 Microsoft Office system. OBAs deliver people-centric, collaborative solutions to the enterprise through familiar Microsoft Office servers, clients, and tools. This document discusses today's business environment, identifies a "results gap" that contributes to reduced productivity, and shows that OBAs are an effective new approach that enables enterprises to achieve the "last mile of productivity." You will see that several key components of the 2007 Microsoft Office system can be used to develop Office Business Applications and that, when Line of Business Integration (LOBi) for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is released, it will further simplify the development of OBAs. Finally, if you would like to develop a collaboration-planning scenario using the 2007 Office system, just follow the steps outlined in this paper."

The Henry Blodgett article comparing Google and Microsoft. Excellent source!

Blodgett calls Windows a "natural monopoly," a term derived from the science of economics. But the view of Windows as a natural monopoly blinks past more than a few facts: [i] the monopoly at all times was firmly rooted in government-granted monopoly created by copyrights, patents, and trade secrets; [ii] even the 3.x versions depended mightily on antitrust violations involving DR DOS; and [iii] the dependence on antitrust violations to build, maintain, and extend the monopoly continue to this day. I see scant basis for labeling Windows as a "natural monopoly." Economic theory may blink past the antitrust issues on free market principles, but it may not blink past the government grants of monopolies in similar fashion..

"Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted unanimously to formally propose using new technology to get important information to investors faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. At the center of the SEC proposal is "interactive data" - computer "tags" similar in function to bar codes used to identify groceries and shipped packages. The interactive data tags uniquely identify individual items in a company's financial statement so they can be easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases, and put to any number of other comparative and analytical uses by investors, analysts, and journalists. The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to provide financial information using interactive data beginning next year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public companies." Note that reports must currently be submitted in the Edgar format, with WordPerfect the only major word processor writing directly to Edgar. See also http://www.xbrl.org/faq.aspx (.) The proposal is potentially susceptible to legal challenge at the WTO per terms of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agrement on Government Procurement. If approved, XBRL would constitute a "technical regulation" within the meaning of the ATBT and a "technical specification" within the meaning of the AGP. That raises the issue of whether XBRL constitutes an unnecessary obstacle to international trade within the meaning of those treaties. This is the kind of stuff that is supposed to get sorted out by joint creation of an international standard by ATBT member nations. But both treaties are very poorly implemented in the U.S.

Tomorrow's Web Despite differences in approach between AIR and Gears, Adobe and Google actually share a common vision. Both companies aim to extend the current Web browsing experience with new features that allow developers to deliver RIAs more easily. And, because Web developers, too, have diverse goals and methods, the traditional browser is unlikely to disappear as an application-delivery platform, even as desktop-based Web apps proliferate.

Microsoft faces down threats from Google, IBM and SalesForce.com with it's threat to enterprise IT - MSOffice as the ultimate browser.

Google Office productivity alternatives are "trapped inside the browser". MSOffice, Silverlight, Live Mesh and Adobe Flex "RIA" browser alternatives are comparatively feature rich and powerfull.

""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.

"Sun Microsystems demos two new JavaFX-powered applications, Photo Flocker and Movie Cloud, at its annual JavaOne Conference in San Francisco Tuesday." Part of the JavaFX package is new codecs. The video on this page demos the high-definition video codecs and 3-D effects., plus some sound. The HD video impressed me. It's noticeably better than normal video fare on the web.

"JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license." But note that Schwartz stretches the truth mightily here. E.g., Solaris is under the CDDL license, OpenOffice.org was just changed to LGPLv3 from LGPLv2, on and on.

Review of Henry Blodgett's predicitve analysis that within the next year Google's search revenue will surpass Microsoft's revenue from Windows. MS still has MSOffice and the Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server juggernaut. But Blodgett fearlessly predicts the beginning of the end fo rthe great monopolist. Great quote from Microsoft's Ben Slovika.

CellNode M100 is a unique WiFi device which enables providers to securely deploy wireless mesh networks. Every CellNode features two radio transceivers that support the 802.11a/g/b standards. The first radio usually serves local wireless subscribers (downlink) at 2.4Ghz, while the second radio is used to connect to the infrastructure backbone (uplink) at 5Ghz.

"CellNode M100 is designed for deployment in wireless mesh infrastructure. In such infrastructure, each CellNode M100 communicates with an uplink relay (bridge) or access controller and with other wireless clients within its reach. If one CellNode device becomes temporarily unavailable, traffic is transparently redirected to other CellNodes located within physical proximity." I'm not a hardware expert by any means, but the sniff here is sprinkling these things around town, managing centrally including firmware update rollouts, built in UPS for keeping the network up during power outages, automagic switching to other nodes if one goes down, on and on and on. Could I cope with a mere 54 Mbs 802.11/n connection instead of Comcast's ~ 11 Mpbs just to save $50 a month? Gee, that's a hard one. I'll have to think about that. No wonder the cable and telco providers are fighting municipal networks hair, tooth, and nail.

It might take Google and Microsoft-technology giants, but health-records neophytes-to give networked and interoperable electronic health records just the kick start they need to escape the siloed and proprietary model now prevalent. The new technologies, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, are classified as personal health records (PHRs), which are a subset of industry-recognized electronic health records (EHRs).

What is the likelihood that the Microsoft and Google solutions will be interoperable? Will either company be able to resist the temptation to introduce incompatibilities? Methinks it far more likely based on the history in the software industry that the interoperability will be intra-company solution rather than between each company's solution. This is a potential issue for the same reason that the solutions are being developed; people in the U.S. have many health care providers. Records can't be consolidated and made portable absent interoperability. I haven't researched the issue, but I note it.