The technology and business implications of the next generation of software, rich Internet applications.
I had a chance to dig into the ZapThink report which predicted spending on RIAs would exceed $500 million dollars by 2011. The rest of the report is absolutely fantastic and I suggest that any company currently developing RIAs or thinking about doing so in the future get a copy of this report. It gives a great foundation for how RIAs came to be, the value they provide, and the direction they are going to head in the future.
I had an interesting conversation today with Keith Smith from the Atlas project at Microsoft and I recently talked to Andre Charland and Dave Johnson of eBusiness Applications (they are doing some amazing things with Ajax) . If you've read my posts, you know that I'm not really big on using Ajax to build applications. I think it's a good technology and that it adds a lot to the experience, but building applications with it limits that application to the confines and rules of the browser. In this day and age, those are simply too limiting for the kinds of experiences that we can deliver.
Through fellow ZDNet blogger Marc Orchant, I caught a post by Robert McLaws imploring Microsoft to delay Vista and make sure it's ready. Seems like sensible advice, but Vista has become an almost uncontrollable beast, and everything depends on it, including their RIA strategy with Windows Presentation Foundation.
Over on the OpenLaszlo Weblog, Henry Minsky blogged about testing out a new OpenLaszlo kernal based on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Right now it looks to be a very rough cut, but according to Henry, he is going to see about cleaning it up and adding it to the Legals release which I blogged about earlier.
On Thursday, research firm ZapThink announced their findings that enterprise spending on RIAs will exceed the $500 million mark in the next 5 years.
Richard McManus has a great post covering Ray Ozzie's speech which I wrote about last week. He does a very good job of putting both Ray's comments in perspective as well as the general landscape of the web. I wanted to make a few comments, because I don't know that I was as clear as I could have been in my previous post.
I'm a bit late to this, but it wasn't until last night, when I received an email from Kendall Whitehouse of The Wharton School that I stopped to take a long look at the new services on Digg Labs. In the email, Kendall described them as offering "a glimpse at the possibilities of RIAs to deliver a real-time experience to the web." As I look at both stack and swarm I think he's right.
I had a lot of faith in Ray Ozzie and when he was announced as the successor to Bill Gates, I anticipated good things for Microsoft. Today I downgraded my faith level in Ray after reading some Joe Wilcox's analysis on Ray's presentation at Microsoft's annual financial analysts meeting. I'm not sure if Ray was just too afraid to stray far from the mothership, or if he really believes what he's saying, but either way I get the feeling it's "Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft." Joe notes that Ray dismissed the web saying "I do not believe the Web is the be-all and end-all of experience delivery. I believe that mobile devices are an amazingly important thing." This sounds pretty reasonable to me, except that I think those mobile devices are best used as tools to leverage the web. This is where the picture of Microsoft's vision gets a little clearer.
On Tuesday, Nathan Herring blogged that he was leaving the CoreCLR team to work on the Mac version of the MiniCLR that will make up a part of WPF/E. While the announcement is relatively small, Bruce McLeod noted that this essentially confirms some of the .NET runtime will be ported to Mac OSX.
If you've read my bio, you know that I have an Economics degree from Penn. That pretty much entitles me to take your order at Starbucks. Essentially, it means that I wasn't quite good enough to get into Wharton and didn't want to work as hard as the Engineering kids. Despite my lackluster showing as a student, sitting through a bunch of economic classes did teach me to look at things a little differently, which has been an asset when evaluating technology. It is also one of the reasons I struggle so much with the issue of cross platform.