The @Microsoft twitter account pointed me at this short post on some editorially placed tags in the September issue of Architectural Digest. The tags themselves are branded with the logo of the magazine, which (see Why Has The Barcode Never Changed? on a similar subject)

In itself, this is an interesting way of linking physical media to virtual media in a continuous way.

The tags themselves can be read by a variety of devices (even the iPhone). There’s more info and download mechanisms at the Tag site.

If you’re interested in Tag, then it’s ridiculously easy to use:

• Go to http://tag.microsoft.com
• Sign in with a Live ID
• Create a tag which might contain a URL, plain text or a phone number to call
• Print/Distribute the resulting tag
• Monitor the success of the tag from the dashboard

Meantime if you want to see a cool video of a very smart kid building a tag with Rubik’s Cubes then look no further (thanks to Mel)

Remember some time back when Ray Ozzie got up and talked about the “Software + Services” vision (or in this case – wrote about it). Do ya?

So what did you think at the time? Maybe you thought:

• w00t! That’s the way it should be…
• I don’t get it
• Bah, the future is the web. Microsoft would say that…
• Clumsy name…

Philosophically, I figured it was probably right. “Everything returns to centre”, and so much of the client vs. cloud debate is polarised. I don’t believe we have a solely desktop based future any more than I believe there’s a solely web based future. (I use future loosely as a lot of stuff happens really rapidly these days!)

(Another stolen line from my PHB: The paperless office is as likely as the paperless toilet.)

I get annoyed when mutual exclusion is used in this debate. Sure, the “web” is the future in terms of the opportunity it affords – information, connection and so on. But how you interact with the web is not a given. A couple of years ago we were seeing the need for smart management (super-bookmarks) of the vast plethora of web services of one kind or another, but now that stuff sort of comes to you via one of the web platforms: Facebook, Twitter or whatever. (How many websites do you use on a daily basis? I have a handful of destinations, but these are hubs for a massive number of individual services and information sources. And I search of course.)

It was all about the browser. Perceived as the window to quick, efficient, application development with maximum reach it enabled things we couldn’t have imagined. But now where are we seeing growth? “Apps” is the word du jour (been around forever but is seeing a trendy renaissance in the popular press).

I guess the difference here is that we tend to mean clients for existing web service. Or – as a redux – we mean Twitter clients ;) We also tend to mean “delivered by independent developers” – which isn’t really true, but it feels like a cool thing to say with a smattering of ‘new economy goldrush’ about it.

“App” development is also driven by new capabilities in Natural User Interface technology (for instance). Devices are more capable, users have greater expectations and the standard web technologies aren’t quite up to it. Client software in the form of platform-specific code, or Silverlight/Flash cross-platform runtimes is in the ascendency.

Examples like XBox Live, and Apple’s iTunes were useful beacons to the S+S ideas. There’s quite a few folk referencing the principle of Software + Services since then though:

• “We are taking a balanced approach, and are building a hosted infrastructure. It’s not just about the cloud, but also about the desktop. There are some who are all about the cloud while others think about the desktop first. We have a hybrid approach, and we are doing that with our products like AIR.” - Kevin Lynch, CTO, Adobe (August 2008), http://gigaom.com/2008/08/04/the-gigaom-interview-kevin-lynch-cto-adobe-systems
• “The real opportunity that the cloud offers large companies today is as a supplement or complement to their in-house operations rather than as a complete replacement” - Nick Carr “Rough Type” blog (April 2009), http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/the_big_company.php
• “Microsoft's Software + Service strategy has rapidly matured and is native to Exchange 2010. This architecture of a single environment that spans on-premise and cloud-based gives large firms an opportunity to leave some mailboxes on-premise and host others in the cloud to save money without incurring admin hassles.” - Ted Shadler, The Forrester Blog for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals (April 2009), http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/04/exchange-2010-tier-your-workforce-split-your-domain-save-money.html
• “Economics of IT are changing, and many companies are looking at combinations of on-premise software and software as a service.” - Rishi Chandra, Product Manager for Google Enterprise (June 2008), http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/06/google_sees_clo.html
• “There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can't do in Web apps” - Linus Upson, Google Engineering Director, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10227150-2.html
• “IBM believes this view neglects to consider that large enterprises are not going to outsource their entire data center operations to a public cloud like Amazon’s. Different workloads demand different support, and as such, there are certain applications that shouldn’t be moved to a cloud model.” – IBM (April 2009), http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16384
• “Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff … to announce a partnership to sell customers on the hybrid cloud idea – an initiative called ‘The Best of Both Worlds.’  For Benioff, who until now has marketed Salesforce with a ‘Software is Dead’ slogan, that’s quite a shift…” - Fortune on the shift to cloud computing (October 2009), http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/22/a-kinder-gentler-cloud/

So Software + Services? Yes indeed.

Besides, 100,000 apps (or whatever today’s Really Big Number is) in the AppStore can’t be wrong. (OK, not all of them are connected apps – there’s a bunch of games and fart simulators).

From a Microsoft POV, the key thing is delivering on the Services part of “Software + Services” and we’re seeing that now with the Azure platform, Bing, our Online Services and so on. To an individual developer, it means tools and technologies that enable you to work easily across the scope of Software + Services environment: so everything from WPF and Silverlight through to ASP.NET and the stacks that go with those.

From your POV it probably means different things – maybe you’re not covering the whole of S+S in what you do – you’re maybe just working across component parts of it:

• Are you a developer or architect? What are you developing these days? Software? Services? You’re probably thinking about RIAs and cloud-based aspects of the services as your next gen architecture… (Show me a business plan that doesn’t have cloud and API in it these days and I’ll show you someone getting frogmarched out of a posh VC luncheon…)
• Are you in IT? You’re probably thinking about the implications of issues such as compliance, security, governance, management.
• Are you in business? You’re probably thinking about whether/how to leverage the cloud? What’s the ROI? What does is it mean for your business model? Who do you integrate with? What horses do you back?

Some of these questions are being answered. Some remain outstanding, or require pathfinding. But one thing seems certain: we’re living in a world of Software + Services. You can call it what you want. Turns out Ray was right. Crafty.

Filed under “stuff that happened while I was away” is this fairly important announcement that GSK is to deploy 100,000 seats of hosted services from Microsoft (they’d previously been on Notes).

As ZDNet reports, it makes Google’s 15,000 seats at Genetech look small by comparison. Of course, size isn’t everything, but as Ron Markezich (Corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services) says: “If a customer like GlaxoSmithKline comes over to Microsoft Online Services, then any customer in the world can.” There’s a real benchmark being set here.

Given further reports of GMail issues today (and then those more major issues from the other week), I think that it has to make one wonder whether Google is up to the rigours of delivering enterprise software.

It’s certainly clear that GSK think that Microsoft Online Services are able to deliver the enterprise capability they require. There’s a video of Bill Louv (CIO of GSK) talking to Ron about the drivers for the decision here.

OK, so obviously I’m going to have a bit of a dig at Google suffering from a few problems on the email front (and apparently some weird stuff on the Groups front). Of course this is because the typical news coverage they get is ‘Ooh, they have a new Favicon’ (Come on BBC…) or ‘Hey, they did/did not discover Atlantis”. Er, no, but they did discover an enormous amount of free PR from a ho-hum feature addition to Google Earth.

The more worrying possibilities of information control tend not to make the mainstream news.

Anyhoo, from seems that the sensible GMail users have been using Gears to good effect. That is, they’ve used it to get their email offline, as in client, as in software sense.

Now, any system can fall over, or anything can happen in the middle to prevent access or whatever. The problem with the pure SaaS approach is that it leaves you blind as well as functionally incapable, with – likely – a wider effect. That’s cool for my junk mail address – I can live with it. Not so much if your business depends on it.

S+S even more redux:

• Consumer: Live Services like http://www.windows.live.co.uk
• Business: Hosted services like SharePoint and Exchange
• Developers and ISVS: Azure http://www.microsoft.com/azure

Alright, back to seeing if I can find the real Atlantis…

While we’re on the subject of good value, I was reminded of The Ultimate Steal: Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate at the price of £38.95 for students and staff at academic institutions.

That's a pretty good deal: I’m a OneNote junkie so IMHO this is worth the cash for that alone, leaving aside Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Groove, InfoPath, Publisher and Outlook. Add a little Mesh, and a little Office Live Workspaces and I’m happy.

Back in my day, I blew £1500 on a 486 DX/2 50 PC from Dixons only to discover that Uni had no dial up access, and I couldn’t get my hands on compilers for PoP-11. I became good at Solitaire. Happy days.

If you could see my office, then you’d know I sit in the same cluster as Lars. But you don’t so I’m mentioning it here. One of the handy things about sitting next to Lars (apart from the tidiness and general hospitality) is that he keeps me up to date on the startup scene such as his bent, handling our BizSpark activities (amongst other things).

If you’re a startup, you should explore what BizSpark has to offer – there’s a good post here too. I remember working on my own startup – the ill-fated Zapitover – back around 2000 and a portion of our startup costs was the licencing of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange. BizSpark would have allowed me to buy a chair or a desk, or something (I’d be digressing to explain the full set-up we had, but suffice to say it was “bare bones” and ended in the usual round of failure and people blaming each other… YMMV).

Anyway, he mentioned Wigadoo, so I looked it up and just thought the idea was cool so I’d mention it. Essentially they provide functionality to organise a shared cost “event”, like an evening out, by providing some logic and issuing a virtual credit card on completion of the organisational bits and pieces.

So immediately I can see value in this:

• A bunch of us, including Stevecla, are off to see Seth Godin in London in a couple of weeks. But, you know, organisation of who’s going and who’s paying takes a whole bunch of email. And now of course there’ll be a complex set of cash exchange nearer the time, with added confusion as Stevecla avoids buying a round…
• LadyH organised Evan’s birthday party although the parents of 8 different kids were paying. Net result is that it’s a real pain to get the cash from everyone (especially when the amount is £16.23 or something).

In my experience, organisers always end up slightly out of pocket but sometimes that’s OK because they expect that. The challenge is when you don’t expect to be out of pocket and how that gets addressed. 

Nice idea. I’ll try it out next time I need to do something like this.

I like Twitter, really I do, but I don’t go for all this commentary on its future as a platform. But when my good mate @voleshafter begins using it, and then (let’s leave @stephenfry and @wossy aside for a moment) Tim Lovejoy (sorry Tim, I couldn’t be bothered to look for your twag) talks about it on the the gentile BBC2 show “Something for the Weekend”, then I’ll take my time to give some views.

First, it’s so completely open (to abuse as much as API work) and – a lot of the time – it’s so rubbish as it falls over a lot, that I think that it’s easy to consider it “mostly harmless” and therefore one can form an emotional connection with it quite quickly.

Second, it demonstrates the basis of social networking at a level that is barely “above the tin”. I can almost see the database structure as I’m using it. Where the rest of the SN space (Facebook etc.) offer additional functionality (or some kind of domain advantage), Twitter only offers up the minimum ruleset to provide the service. The delicious bit is simply the etiquette and behaviours that have been adapted by its users and developers to deliver all manner of capability.

Third, it provides a different communication mechanism (which is why it’s attractive to brands – particularly niche brands – and celebrities):

• Limiting the size of communication means that there is limited investment from anyone on the network so there is understanding and acceptance that although the message is personal, it doesn’t require a personal response. (cf. Fan Mail, or Help Centres)
• Despite this, there’s an intimacy here that isn’t present in blogging. It’s hard to carry traditional corporate or branded messaging on Twitter, the message has to “be real”. The smart brands (and celebrities) are using it for actual connection and analysis.

Does it have a future? Is it a platform, or a protocol? Is blogging dead? Blah blah blah.

I think the main thing that we can learn from the (early) success of Twitter is that communication on the net is in its infancy. Seemingly crude communication techniques such as this can vastly overachieve against established protocols (or the well understood) such as email as the reasons for wanting to communicate, and the benefits of doing so, change over time. The world (that is, one’s world) has expanded greatly in the past couple of years, and the existing services make plays to enabling the benefit of that current context. As one’s world contracts – once the need for filtering and localised relevance hits home – then we may again need a different set of techniques.

So no sooner have we really started to use SlideShare, then they publish an addin for Office 2007 – very handy indeed. More at TechCrunch.

Today, myself and Blooders presented on Software + Services on the Architecture track at OreDev (as previously mentioned). Our intention was to provoke some thought on the pressures on architects, and the drivers for Software + Services, and help architects think about modelling and translating these pressures and needs for the business. Oh, and of course we mentioned some cloud stuff…

We’d love to hear feedback.

This is the slide deck we presented:

And here are some useful links:

• Software + Services
• Patterns and Practices
• Windows Azure
• Microsoft PDC

Talking of great examples, MikeT had a crack at the Twistori thing that MikeO looked at but took a slightly different tack and employed WPF. He’s written the whole thing up as a 7-part (count ‘em) series. You can start here.

Much as I love Silverlight, I’m a sucker for those WPF shader effects…