Open Web

Gartner Analyst Michael Silver wrote the study, "Windows 7 is all but inevitable".  Here is a quote explaining why it's near impossible to migrate away from MSOffice and the MSOffice Productivity Environment: There have been many organizations that have investigated moving off Microsoft Office, usually to a distribution of OpenOffice.org (including the free download, Sun's StarOffice, Novell Edition and IBM Symphony), but relatively few have actually made the migration. Impediments include switching costs, issues with macros, stationery, databases and mail clients. For better or worse, for the past 15 years, organizations have chosen to overprovision and deploy a product that can do everything the most-advanced user requires to every user for the sake of homogeneity. Organizations that want to deploy OpenOffice.org (OO.o) need to come to terms with the fact that some users will still require MS Office and they will be forced to support a mix of products. To Gartner, it makes sense to take advantage of viable perpetual licenses for Microsoft Office for as long as possible. The expensive product you already own will be cheaper than the cheap or "free" product you need to spend money to which to migrate.

The ripples from the European Commission v. Microsoft decision continue to flow. The catch, of course, is that the patent rights will almost certainly be subject to the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a weasel-worded document that actually grants no rights. http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art71/ But someone with some clout will push that issue sooner or later.

Review of SharePoint-Office 2010 integration.  MSOffice access and integration with SharePoint "content" has been improved and expanded.  Templates, forms and reports have been moved to the SharePoint center.  Or should i say "the many possible SharePoint centers".   There is also an interesting integration of the tagging system, with smart-tags becoming Bing enriched.  Good-bye Google.  Good-bye RDF - RDFa. excerpt:  Many enterprises buy into Microsoft's integrated vision of collaboration because they assume their products work well together. While in the case of SharePoint and Office this is technically true (more so with the 2007 versions), many of these integrations are either not used by or not visible to the average Office user. However, integrations introduced in SharePoint and Office 2010 may change this perception because they are exposed in menus and dialogs used by nearly every Office user. Perhaps supporting SharePoint Online and having SharePoint provide the basis of Office Live Workspaces is encouraging the SharePoint and Office planners to take a more user-centric perspective. In any case, here are some of the new integrations between SharePoint and Office 2010 that you should look for.

excerpt:  Social Business 4.0 (SBS), is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. In this new release, Jive includes deep integration with Microsoft Office, a mobile application for the iPhone and Blackberry plus the ability to bridge from internal to external communities. Jive is offering the ability to create or save documents in Microsoft Office with automatic upload to the Jive platform. Documents are rendered for the browser for users to view and make comments.Users may also collaborate on documents such as Power Point presentations. This co-authoring feature is similar to what you can do in Google Docs.

My initial impression is that this is not good news, that this is a further sign of W3C abandonment of XHTML. The announcement that the WG will be closed by implication means that all CDF WG projects are coming to a standstill. The CDF WICD profiles currently have no profiles developed for spreadsheets and presentations albeit feature-rich enough to serve for web display of presentations. WICD profiles are at version. 2.0, with each 2.0 profile a superset of the 1.0 profiles. They are feature-lean in comparison to desktop word processors. The Compoound Document by Incorporation Framework  is an even more immature document, not nearly ready for prime time. All of which suggests that the Compound Document by Reference Framework itself may be the only WG work product with a shot at survival. HTML 5 and browser quirks mode wins; the world loses. Blech!

Is Adobe AiR a Virtual Desktop?  We expect a VD to run an alien OS and those OS specific applications.  With AiR 2.0 it seems Adobe has ditched the "OS" component of a VD, and the OS specific applications, but is quite capable of running AiR based applications and information services that would otherwise have been designed for a specific OS environment.   Another way of looking at this would be to say that VD's are designed to run existing OS and OS specific applications, while AiR is desinged to run newly written OS independent applications that have one very important advantage over legacy applications and information systems;  AiR speaks the language of the Web 3.0.   This is WebKit HTML5-CSS3 with an advanced but Air specific version of JavaScript called "ActionScript".  What Adobe doesn't do is provide support for other critically important aspects of the WebKit interactive Web 3.0 model: support for Canvas/SVG!  Adobe continues to push the proprietary SWF interactive vector graphics format.   Note that Microsoft's Silverlight universal runtime does not support anything in the WebKit Web 3.0 model!  It's all proprietary. excerpt: For the first time since 2007, Adobe has updated its Air platform, released recently in beta with a slew of new features. The features include support for detection of mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, ability to open a file with its default application, improved cross-platform printing, and a bunch of other things that you probably won't really notice in any other way other than your Adobe working significantly more efficiently and smoothly than before. The 2.0 version of Air also will be able to support HTML5 and CSS3, due to an upgrade of its WebKit. Developers will also be happy to know that they can create Air applications that can be installed through a native installer. Air's changes have seen it morph into something of an 'operating system sitting on an operating system'. According

Kurt Cagle digs into audio and video support in HTML 5. As always, his view is revealing.

An important insight from Tim O'Reilly.

Microsoft last week launched its first serious effort to build IT into its cloud plans by introducing technologies that help connect existing corporate networks and cloud services to make them look like a single infrastructure. The concept began to come together at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. The company is attempting to show that it wants to move beyond the first wave of the cloud trend, which is defined by the availability of raw computing power supplied by Microsoft and competitors such as Amazon and Google. Microsoft's goal is to supply tools, middleware, and services so users can run applications that span corporate and cloud networks, especially those built with Microsoft's Azure cloud operating system.

Office suites are now taking the cloud route and offering advanced services, luring partners with smart gain  By Varun Aggarwal While all applications are moving to the cloud, there is no reason why the ubiquitous office productivity suites like MS Office or OpenOffice should stick to the desktop. Providing customers with a key set of capabilities, and a browser to aid easy access makes complete sense. Take for instance a student working on a class paper. Writing in a Web browser might aid in sharing and incorporating constructive changes, but it is a cumbersome experience as compared to using Office on his PC. But by using productivity suite online, he gets best of both worlds.  

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.

W3C releases CSS Selectors Level 3 as Proposed Recommendation.

Great stats and charts!  Here comes the Android. excerpt: Google's Android operating system has plenty to celebrate this holiday season -- and now, a new trio of studies suggests the platform is poised for even more success in 2010. There's no question Android's been enjoying plenty of time in the spotlight since the launch of Motorola's Droid smartphone. But with dozens of new Android devices expected to debut in the coming months -- possibly even including the omnipotent "Google Phone" (have you seen the things that phone can do?) -- the biggest burst may still be ahead.

JUDGMENT OF THE COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE (Grand Chamber) 17 September 2007 (*) (Competition - Abuse of dominant position - Client PC operating systems - Work group server operating systems - Streaming media players - Decision finding infringements of Article 82 EC - Refusal of the dominant undertaking to supply and authorise the use of interoperability information - Supply by the dominant undertaking of its client PC operating system conditional on the simultaneous acquisition of its media player - Remedies - Appointment of an independent monitoring trustee - Fine - Determination of the amount - Proportionality) In Case T-201/04, Microsoft Corp., established in Redmond, Washington (United States), represented by J.-F. Bellis, lawyer, and I. Forrester QC,