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I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

"We (Forrester) just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data:   One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14%) than Google Apps (9%).  Just 22% of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36% have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13% of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5%. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13% of companies. "

The Barcelona World Mobility Conference is under way, and Microsoft is making a show of force.  They are hitting with features that support both "Social Network Hubs" (People Hub) and "Productivity Hubs" (Office Hub).  The key to Microsoft's Windows 7 Smartphone success is not that of new and exciting features competitive with Apple and Google smartphones.  No, the key feature that Microsoft owns is that of integration into legacy desktop productivity business systems based on the MSOffice productivity platform, and, more importantly, integration into the emerging Web centered but proprietary Microsoft Business Productivity Platform.  Stay tuned. excerpt on the new Windows 7 feature set:  The Office Hub lets you easily sync your documents between your phone and your PC. Office Hub comes with OneNote, for notetaking, Documents and Sharepoint for presentation collaboration. Users will also have access to an Outlook Mail application which gives similar features, like flagging important e-mails, that you'd find on the desktop version.

It's game on between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.  Interesting price configurations indicate that Cloud Computing is now a commodity.  One point in the article worth noting is that Cloud applications and services begin as "Cloud" apps - not desktop or client/server.  Bad news for Microsoft..... Excerpt: Microsoft, with its flagship operating system and rich line of related tools and applications, is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but often not to its Azure cloud. AWS and Rackspace have offered cheaper raw online computing power. VMware-backed Cloud Foundry offers a development platform to build apps that can deploy on a number of vendors' clouds, and VMware recently made Cloud Foundry more Windows-friendly. Hewlett-Packard, which is just entering the cloud infrastructure market, is emphasizing its own development platform. To keep cloud app developers engaged, Microsoft must put the right resources on Azure's platform-as-a-service--developer tools, database services, and messaging services--but also make it affordable. Today's most creative new software projects often begin in a cloud, and a big reason is to keep startup costs low. Cloud computing is critical to the future of the Windows franchise.

Today Microsoft announced an open source cloud collaboration that may surprise some people, but not our customers and partners who have relied on our interoperability solutions over the past few years. Today Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V  to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud infrastructure platform. The Hyper-V addition provides enterprise customers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies greater flexibility when using OpenStack. Until today, OpenStack only supported several open source virtualization products. Comment:  Microsoft needs to slow down Google and keep Apple's focus elsewhere.  Contributing a Windows only hypervisor to the OSS Cloud.com OpenStack project is one way Microsoft can hedge their own flailing Azure Cloud effort.  Read the Ray Ozzie good-bye letter.  The combination of Cloud, Web and Mobile Computing is the end of the Windows OS.

In depth technical discussion about Flash, HTML5, H.264, and Google's VP8.  Excellent.  Read the comments.  Bottom line - Google has the juice to put Flash and H.264 in the dirt.  The YouTube acquisition turns out to be very strategic. excerpt: The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks-so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf.  But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all.  But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let's be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened. Flash became popular because of its power and flexibility.  At the time it was the only option for animated vector graphics and interactive content (stuff like VRML hardly counts).  Furthermore, before Flash, the primary video options were Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime: all of which were proprietary, had no free software encoders or decoders, and (except for Windows Media) required the user to install a clunky external application, not merely a plugin.  Given all this, it's clear why Flash won: it supported open multimedia formats like H.263 and MP3, used an ultra-simple container format that anyone could write (FLV), and worked far more easily and reliably than any alternative. Thus, Adobe (actually, at the time, Macromedia) got their 98% install base.  And with that, they began to become complacent.  Any suggestion of a competitor was immediately shrugged off; how could anyone possibly compete with Adobe, given their install base?  It'd be insane, nobody would be able to do it.  They committed the cardinal sin of software development: believing that a competitor being better is excusable.  At x264, if we find a competitor that does something better, we immediately look into trying to put ourselves back on top.  This is why

Here it comes - the "rich" Web experience based on integrated but proprietary 2010 technologies from Microsoft.  Note the comparative "advantages" listed in this article describing Microsoft SkyDrive, and comparing to Google Docs. excerpt:  Do you use Microsoft Office programs for creating documents and then use Google Docs to edit these documents online or as an offsite backup? Well, now that Office 2010 and Office Web Apps are available under public beta for free, here are some reasons why you should consider uploading documents, presentations and spreadsheets into Office Web Apps via Windows Live SkyDrive in addition to your Google Docs account. 1. Windows Live SkyDrive supports larger files 2. Document formatting is preserved 3. Native OpenXML file formats 4. Public Documents are in the Lifestream 5. Content is not 'lost in translation'  ....... When you upload a document in Office Web Apps, the application will automatically preserve all the data in that document even if a particular feature is not currently supported by the online applications. For instance, if your PowerPoint presentation contains a slide transition (e.g., Vortex) that is not supported in the online version of Office, the feature will be preserved in your presentation even if you upload it on to Office Web Apps via Windows Live SkyDrive. Later, when you download and open that presentation inside PowerPoint, it would be just like the original version. The content is not 'lost in translation' with Office Web Apps. Are you using Google Docs as a Document Backup Service?  Office Web Apps won't just preserve all the original features of your documents but you can also download entire directories of Office documents as a ZIP file with a simple click.

Charlie nails it in this analysis of Microsoft's future.  Most interesting is Charlie's explanation of how Microsoft so totally missed the needs of their corporate business user base - the heart of the monopoly!  Windows 8 is a disaster for productivity.  Great analysis! excerpt: Microsoft is in deep trouble, their two main product lines are failing, and the blame game is intensifying. Steve Sinofsky gets the blame this time for the failure of Windows 8, but the real problem is the patterns that are so clearly illustrated by these actions. Microsoft is largely irrelevant to computing of late, the only markets they still play in are evaporating with stunning rapidity. Their long history of circling the wagons tighter and tighter works decently as long as there is not a credible alternative, and that strategy has been the entirety of the Microsoft playbook for so long that there is nothing else now. It works, and as the walls grow higher, customer enmity builds while the value of an alternative grows. This cycle repeats as long as there is no alternative. If there is, everything unravels with frightening rapidity.

Forbes magazine has a doom and gloom Microsoft article that "ends on a note of doom".  They lampoon Windows 8 using the reviews of other bloggers like Charlie Demerjian, "Microsoft has failed". http://goo.gl/H4mZc The end of Microsoft though comes from the inability of Microsoft to change course.  In short, Microsoft has fallen into a death spiral consistent with Catastrophe theory (http://goo.gl/6CWwY). No comment or mention of Microsoft Cloud efforts:  Azure, Live.com, or SkyDrive. excerpt: In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky'd. Or was it Guggenheimer'd? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won't change the outcome. Microsoft has failed. I hope this isn't true. Microsoft has been a stabilizing force in the market and many users are very attached to its products. For the first time, however, businesses can look to Google and to Apple and see plausible, battle-tested alternatives to the products they have used from Microsoft-for much less money. And in a bizarre way, Microsofts spasm of innovation has made the company now a destabilizing factor for IT departments and Google Docs is looking an awful lot like the old guard. The big question is how fast Microsoft might collapse if businesses began to defect en masse. Like other phenomena of global instability, extreme change seems to come quicker now. For Microsoft, the window is closing fast."

Good article describing Node.js.  The Node.js Summitt is taking place in San Francisco on Jan 24th - 25th.  http://goo.gl/AhZTD I'm wondering if anyone has used Node.js to create real time Cloud ready compound documents?  Replacing MSOffice OLE-ODBC-ActiveX heavy productivity documents, forms and reports with Node.js event widgets, messages and database connections?  I'm thinking along the lines of a Lotus Notes alternative with a Node.js enhanced version of EverNote on the front end, and Node.js-Hadoop productivity platform on the server side? Might have to contact Stephen O'Grady on this.  He is a featured speaker at the conference. excerpt: At first, Chito Manansala (Visa & Sabre) built his Internet transaction processing systems using the venerable Java programming language. But he has since dropped Java and switched to what is widely regarded as The Next Big Thing among Silicon Valley developers. He switched to Node. Node is short for Node.js, a new-age programming platform based on a software engine at the heart of Google's Chrome browser. But it's not a browser technology. It's meant to help build software that sits on a distant server somewhere, feeding an application to your PC or smartphone, and it's particularly suited to systems like the one Chito Manansala is building - systems that juggle scads of information streaming to and from other sources. In other words, it's suited to the modern internet. Two years ago, Node was just another open source project. But it has since grown into the development platform of the moment. At Yahoo!, Node underpins "Manhattan," a fledgling online service for building and hosting mobile applications. Microsoft is offering Node atop Windows Azure, its online service for building and hosting a much beefier breed of business application. And Sabre is just one of a host of big names using the open source platform to erect applications on their own servers. Node is based on the Javascript engine at th

Nice OpenMobster graphic!  Good explanation of the Android notification advantage over iOS and Windows 7 too.  Note the exception that iOS-5 finally introduces support for JSON. excerpt: Why Android Rocks the Cloud Most open source mobile-cloud projects are still in the early stages. These include the fledgling cloud-to-mobile push notifications app, SimplePush , and the pre-alpha Mirage  "cloud operating system" which enables the creation of secure network applications across any Xen-ready cloud platform. The 2cloud Project , meanwhile, has the more ambitious goal of enabling complete mobile cloud platforms. All of the above apps support Android, and many support iOS. Among mobile OSes, Android is best equipped to support cloud applications, said Shah. Android supports sockets to help connect to remote services, and supplies a capable SQlite-based local database. It also offers a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) interchange stack to help parse incoming cloud data -- something missing in iOS. Unlike iOS and Windows Phone 7, Android provides background processing, which is useful for building a robust push infrastructure, said Shah. Without it, he added, users need to configure the app to work with a third-party push service. Most importantly, Android is the only major mobile OS to support inter-application communications. "Mobile apps are focused, and tend to do one thing only," said Shah. "When they cannot communicate with each other, you lose innovation." Comment from Sohil Shah, CEO OpenMobster: "I spoke too soon. iOS 5 now supports JSON out of the box. I am still working with a third party library which was needed in iOS 4 and earlier, and to stay backward compatible with those versions.  Anyways, it should have been supported a lot earlier considering the fact that AFAIK, Android has had it since the very beginning. "

Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) Th

If the evidence supports the allegations, this is a plausible antitrust theory, a company with a dominant market position leveraging that position into new markets via integration. In essence this is the same theory as that applied against Microsoft's bundling and integration of Windows, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player.  

ARCELONA - This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago. Last year we expected a slew of handsets, and saw just a trickle. This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines. This is great news for us, the consumer. Android is stable, powerful and now it even runs Flash (I got a sneak peek of Flash running on a Motorola handset here at the show. It crashed). It's even better for the manufacturers, as - unlike Windows Mobile - Android is free. It's also open, so the phone makers can tweak it and trick it out as much as they like. And they do like. Most of the Android phones here at Mobile World Congress are running custom versions of Android, which differentiates them and, in theory at least, makes them easier to use, hiding the complexities of a proper multitasking OS from the user.

Roger Black is a publication designer, and Filipe Fortes was the project manager for Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation - Silverlight project.  Today he specializes in dynamic layout algorithms written in Open Web JavaScript.  Roger is a reknown publication designer, and describes here the genesis behind TreeSaver.  Fascinating story certain to become a key explanation of how digital media ran away with the print publishing industry.   I'm wondering what kind of authoring tools will evolve that can publish directly into the TS JavaScript templates?   My first inclination would be to adapt OOo Impress.  It has an outline view, a notes editing capability, and provides a decent visual canvas.  The problem is that it's locked into "slides".  Can Impress be unlocked and flowing?  That might work. excerpt:  when Microsoft put together a dynamic page layout for The New York Times Reader, did they know that it was the future? It certainly wasn't the immediate present, since they couldn't pry the WPF visual layer off of Windows, leaving it a single-OS solution. (The Times' Reader later was taken up by Adobe, which at least got it to work on both Mac and PC.) Filipe Fortes, PM on the MS news client project, knew. I'd met him when the group invited me out to Redmond to help design the first templates for the Times. Later I saw him at the 2007 Mix conference in Vegas, and I asked him how to make the dynamic page size idea work multi-platform. He said, "We could do it in HTML."