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Über technologist Michael Hickens writes about the recent Cisco announcement that they intend on competing with Google, Zoho and MOSS in the cloud collaboration space. I left a lengthy comment on this page, trying to come to grips with the meaning of this challenge. I titled my comment, "Cisco Office? Maybe they should consider Feng Office-in-the-Cloud". Good luck Conrado. Go get them.

Interestingly, Jason Harrop and i met Ms. Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. She was kind enough to refer me directly to David Knight, the technology director of Cisco's WebEX Conferencing initiative. Alex is quoted in a CNet article at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html

Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise into a reassuring presence, particularly for veteran IT administrators struggling to balance their in-house infrastructures against the cost-savings and potential efficiencies of cloud computing.

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Michael Hickens has been writing about Google Wave and how it will forever change the Web. In a recent article he took on the incredible WebKit - HTML+ phenomenon, tying in the surge of WebKit marketshare at the edge of the Web with dramatic changes taking place across greater Web.
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From Michaels article: .... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"
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The year 1998 marked the end of the browser wars, the end of Netscape, and the beginning of Microsoft's anti-trust woes. It also marked the beginning of XML, and the end of HTML, with the W3C leaving HTML, CSS and SVG to rot. What a year.

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Today we find the landscape considerably changed. Instead of a browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, ending with the triumph of an IE monopoly, today we have a browser race. And IE isn't a contender, having been pretty much abandoned by Microsoft once they had Netscape in the dirt.

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The introduction of XML 1.0 in 1998 ushered in a new era of customized XML schema's for all kinds of data exchanges. The Web came alive with data flows from disparate databases and transaction systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The noise across the Web, private and public, was deafening.

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There was however a few notable attempts to encode document based content in XML, with OpenOffice ODF and MSOffice OOXML taking center stage. Unlike the excitement and extraordinary Web capabilities that surrounded XML data schema work, XML documents veered away from the Web. By design, ODF and OOXML are incompatible with the language of the Web. But given the legacy of client/server dominance powerful "end-user-facing" desktop office

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Nice catch and cast from Michael Hickens. He walks us through some strange goings on at SalesForce.com. It seems Commander Benioff has ordered the good ship SlaesForce to turn on a dime, drop everything, and set a course for Wave. Good stuff:

"...... Could Salesforce be reengineering its AppExchange platform to run standards-based code like HTML 5? The reason I ask is that none other than Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff listed his status on Facebook this weekend as: “working on salesforce.com’s new architecture.” There would have to be a very good reason, or a transformational event like Google’s introduction of its Wave, for the company to change a key element of its strategy.

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<i>....."With Wave, which Google previewed for developers at its I/O conference yesterday, developers can for the first time create Web-based applications that compete with Microsoft in terms of quality (while utterly trumping it on price). It also creates the conditions for customers to comfortably shuck off the shackles of installed software — including Office and other Microsoft products — in exchange for truly lightweight hardware like netbooks or advanced smartphones, without sacrificing the richness of their computing experience. If it gets the kind of developer love it should, Wave is just the first of a series of a breakers that will loosen Microsoft’s grip on the desktop, and may also render Adobe wholly irrelevant."</i>

<i> .... "Wave is a Web-based application that breaks artificial barriers between document types; work documents, email, instant messages, photographs, maps — Wave makes no functional distinction between them, and allows users to literally drag all those elements into a single, shareable meta-document. Wave is written using HTML 5, the first significant change to standards for Web coding since 1998. HTML 5 also forms the basis for Webkit, the language underlying the operating systems of the vast majority of smartphone browsers — Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Palm’s WebOS and Nokia’s Symbian. The one glaring omission? Microsoft Windows Mobile, of course.............. "</i>

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