OpenWeb 12/04/2009 (a.m.)

• As Google Backs Away From A Plug-in, Microsoft Rushes Towards One - washingtonpost.com

  I posted two lengthy comments here.  Can't see the forest for all the trees is the idiom that comes to mind. excerpt: With Silverlight, Microsoft continues to make it clear that they intend to use this web application framework, which they developed, to power much of what they are doing on the web going forward. Again, the problem here is that not only does Microsoft control this, but it requires a plug-in to use. Sure, they've made the plug-in available to most browsers, including the ones by rivals Google and Apple, but it's still a plug-in. It's something that's going to stop everyone from seeing the same web no matter which browser they use. This has of course long been an issue with Microsoft. Despite a clear shift within the rest of the industry toward web standards, Microsoft long played difficult with its Internet Explorer browser. They could afford to, and maybe you could even argue that it was in their interest to, because they were so dominant. It was only when a standards-based browser, Mozilla's Firefox, started biting off significant chunks of IE's market share that Microsoft shifted their position to play more nicely with standards.

  Tags: ge, silverlight, wpf, Open-Web-Productivity

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 12/03/2009 (a.m.)

• Google waving goodbye to Gears, hello to HTML5 [Updated] | Technology | Los Angeles Times

  Tags: Google Gears, HTML 5, Chrome

  • As Google prepares to release its first beta version of Chrome for the Mac (a developer preview has been available for months), the company is letting the sun set on its Gears project.

    "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites," wrote a Google spokesman in an e-mail.

    That's great, but HTML5 isn't ready yet, and commercially available browsers don't support it.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Future of the Web 12/03/2009 (a.m.)

• Google waving goodbye to Gears, hello to HTML5 [Updated] | Technology | Los Angeles Times

  Tags: Google Gears, HTML 5, Chrome

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Future of the Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 10/18/2009 (a.m.)

• Gray Matter : Open XML and the SharePoint Conference

  excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible. The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server). comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment. What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings. Note that OpenXML is the only document format supported by MS Web Apps (Live)!  The MSWeb does not support HTML5 documents.

  Tags: Open-Web, MSOffice, ge

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Future of the Web 10/11/2009 (a.m.)

• Knowledge Genes® - Welcome Page

  Tags: web2.0, collaboration, Knowledge, tools, future

  • Better knowledge, process and control
    coded WHAT, HOW and WHY
  • Better information in terms of WHAT you need to achieve, HOW and WHY

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Future of the Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 10/10/2009 (a.m.)

• Google Cloudboard - Moving the Point of Assembly

  Google tests a service called Cloudboard, an online clipboard that should make it easy to copy data between Gmail, Google Docs and other Google services. The service is not publicly available yet, but there are many references to it. lengthy comment from ~ge~

  Tags: ge, Open-Web, MS-WebStack, Google, unified-productivity

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 09/23/2009 (a.m.)

• Zoho's Next Big Thing | ge TalkBack on ZDNet

  Moving the Point of Assembly Kudos to Zoho. Their efforts remind me of the early days of the Microsoft Productivity Environment where core MSOffice editors expanded their reach through DDE, OLE, rich copy/paste, data binding, merged content and data, VBA scripting and the infamous recorder, and a developer API that meshed platform and productivity apps so deeply into end user information that the binding of business processes to the MOPE is proving near impossible to break. Even for years after the fact. A business ecosystem for client/server was born back in the early 90's, with Microsoft continuing on to own entirely the client side of the equation.

  Tags: ge, zoho, zdnet, mope, poa

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 09/07/2009 (a.m.)

• AppleInsider | Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Exchange Support

  Apple desktop and iPhone support of Microsoft Exchange is not support for Microsoft, as some think.  It's actually a strategy to erode Microsoft's desktop monopoly.  It's also part of a longer term plan to thwart Microsoft's hopes of leveraging their desktop monopoly into a Web Server monopoly. Excerpt: Apple is reducing its dependance upon Microsoft's client software, weakening Microsoft's ability to hold back and dumb down its Mac offerings at Apple's expense. More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community. In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape's web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That's what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft. As Apple takes over the client end of Exchange, it similarly gains market leverage. First and foremost, the move allows Apple to improve the Exchange experience of Mac users so that business users have no reason not to buy Macs. Secondly, it gives Apple a client audience to market its own server solutions, including MobileMe to individual users and Snow Leopard Server to organizations. In concert with providing Exchange Server support, Apple is also delivering integrated support for its own Exchange alternatives in both MobileMe and with Snow Leopard Server's improved Dovecot email services, Address Book Server, iCal Server, the new Mobile Access secure gateway, and its included Push Notification Server.

  Tags: exchange, apple, iphone, monopoly

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.