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Connectivity

The marketplace is very fragmented. To reach every device you have to target about 14 different platforms. Not every development team has the resources to build it for every platform. We believe over time the browser on mobile devices will be the entry point for many applications. But today the majority of mobile phones don’t have the browser that can do it.

Android is an open source world class mobile stack. We hope the industry will adopt it. The WebKit browser comes with Android.

Some of the next generation collaboration platforms are succeeding precisely because they are silo bunker busters. The problem of dozens of digital filing cabinets full of thousands of iterations of hard to find documents within enterprise environments is arguably being solved by the new generation of nimble project contextual tools. Taxonomies and tagging, threaded discussion, wikis and other ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ tools are an alternative solution to the problem of generating mountains of hard to find silo’d information and associated email.

Microsoft have a fabulously lucrative franchise with their Office suite of Word, PowerPoint, Excel et al desktop products. A huge issue in the enterprise space is blizzards of email containing links to documents created with these products on shared drives, or iterations actually attached to the mail messages. Add mobile users on laptops with intermittent connection and you also have serious synch headaches.

Gundotra said Google “believes in the vision of software as a service.” But the barrier to enabling enterprises to use cloud computing on an even greater scale is that the browsers have to become more powerful to have the full client computing capability of the PC platform.

He noted that this is already starting to happen. Google, he said, is “thrilled” with the new features built into the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 browsers. Google said this is a sign that the next generation of browsers, including Internet Explorer, “will have very significant improvements” that will give the features they need for cloud computing.

The vision of application development that Microsoft promoted before the release of the Vista update to Windows relied on a three-part promise of superior communications, superior interactive graphics and a superior model of client-side storage. Delivering that combination, known at one time as the "three pillars of Longhorn," would have encouraged developers to think in terms of a rich Windows-specific application that exploited the client-side platform to define and deliver the user experience—while calling out to the Internet cloud for data and background services.

That was a powerful vision, but it was not delivered in anything like the time frame promised, nor were all of the pieces put together to complete the picture that had been so attractively drawn. The focus of developers has therefore shifted into the cloud itself, sometimes combined with client-side cross-platform logic using mechanisms such as AJAX—and decoupling application access from client-side platform choice.

Cloud computing will give rise to the 'power collaborator', who will "connect with people and find dispersed information across an organization and make it relevant," said speaking in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference continuing through Thursday.

The concept of cloud computing and Enterprise 2.0 Web-based applications and interactivity has apparently struck a positive chord with a fair number of businesses. Up to 69% cite collaboration as a key reason for the appeal of such environments, according to a survey released this week by AIIM, a non-profit group that tackles issues involving document management, content, records, and business processes. Other factors include: Improved agility and responsiveness (56%), faster communications (55%); increased innovation (39%); and a reduction in IT costs (36%).

Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows.

Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.

Microsoft is investing some of the top engineering talent at the company to make two key investments:

• Deliver a world class SOA platform across client, server, and cloud. Microsoft has been a thought leader in Web services and SOA technologies since the very beginning and has delivered industry leading technologies such as the Windows Communication Foundation and BizTalk Server.


• Deliver a world class and mainstream modeling platform that helps the roles of IT collaborate and enables better integration between IT and the business. The modeling platform enables higher level descriptions, so called declarative descriptions, of the application.

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.

Once in a while, a confluence of random events (or not so random, depending on your belief system) can create the ideal aha! moment. The moment of clarity when all the pieces just fall into place and you realize "that's what's going on!"

I believe I have had one of those moments. And if this thought has any basis in reality, it could mean that everything we have seen in IT is about to make a huge change.

TCG Advisors envisions a new computing model for when the inter-enterprise becomes the basis of all IT infrastructure. Where
can we expect the most change?

All the action is going to be in the middle [layer] in preparation for a significant change at the top in about five years.
We are all [preparing] for a new business model: the inter-enterprise network value chain. For the inter-enterprise network
value chain, traditional business applications need to be re-architected so they can cross company boundaries. When people
look at this re-architecting, they see two huge barriers: the middleware, because our software doesn't work this way, and
the business process layer, because people don't have a lot of experience [with it]. There will be a fair amount of trial
and error before we figure this out. Even thought leaders are struggling.

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.