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.

I could speculate – like many other people – on what the Oracle/Sun acquisition may mean for MySQL, but I’m sure that it’s best that I don’t for a whole variety of reasons (the first one being I’ll likely be wrong).

But anyway, if you’re thinking ‘start-up’ then you might want to take a look at BizSpark and the access it provides to SQL Server (amongst other stuff) and all, essentially, for nothing (actually a $100 exit fee). Drop @bindik a line to explain more, but here’s the basics (my highlight below):

• All the software included in the Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN® Premium subscription
• Expression® Studio Version 2
• VSTS Team Foundation Server (standard edition)
• Production use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed during participation in the BizSpark Program, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to the latest versions of Microsoft products including:
  • Microsoft Windows Server® (all editions up to and including Enterprise)
  • Microsoft SQL Server® (all editions)
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server
  • Microsoft System Center
  • Microsoft BizTalk® Server
  • Microsoft Dynamics® CRM (coming soon)
• In addition to the core program offering, BizSpark startups will be eligible for other Microsoft offerings, such as:
  • Microsoft Azure™ Services Platform

Do you qualify for BizSpark? The simple criteria and more details on the deal are here.

No sooner have I finished banging on about IE8 than Tesco go ahead and release an accelerator to allow searching for groceries from IE.

Cunningly, this accelerator takes advantage of the APIs that Tesco have released (some related posts there) and is hosted on Azure to ensure scalability. Here is a picture of it in action:

There’s more info here on the blog of Nick Lansley, the smart Head of R&D at Tesco.com.

I’m running Windows 7 right now on all of my machines so I don’t have the RTM version of IE8 but I figured that I should probably sort out what I’ve got. When I joined Microsoft I was fairly fastidious in my use of IE, but I confess that I had a bit of an on-off relationship with it and have used Firefox quite a bit.

Some of the use of FF has been convenience in having multiple browsers to manage multiple personas: so I use IE for work and FF for personal use (the reality is that I prefer Flock over Firefox as it is designed as more of a social workbench). It’d be great if any browser could have multiple personas: launch IE8 as <profile x> or launch IE8 as <Live ID> or whatever. I can lose track of who I am sometimes…

My other use is my perception of FF as having a bunch of useful add-ons that I find indispensible and can’t get elsewhere. I’ve dabbled with many add-ons but then I started to look at what I actually use: Blog this for Live Writer, Delicious, Foxmarks, FireFTP, Firebug and Sxipper.

So actually it turns out that I can do most of those in IE8. The exceptions are FTP (though I can do that elsewhere) and Sxipper (which I’d love to see on IE8).

Anyhoo, I headed off to the Addons site for IE8 and have added the following:

Search – A whole bunch of search providers such as Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, my own blog and so on. Pretty obvious.

Addons

• Delicious Bookmarks
• Foxmarks (I could have rigged something up in Mesh too of course)
• PDF Download – Nitro
• I suspect I’ll add Oomph at some point

Accelerators

• Shorten with bit.ly
• Share with Twitter
• Share with Messenger
• YouTube Search
• I’ve also used the “manage” panel to remove stuff I don’t use (like Translate) and ensure quick access to the ones I do use

Web Slices:

• Recent Channel 9 Videos
• Most Twittered Videos

The jury is still out as to how useful the web slices will be on an ongoing basis, so I’m just experimenting with a couple.

I’ve also got Fiddler installed, and of course IE8 comes with developer tools already so need to add to those.

End result: I’m feeling surprisingly good about the notion that IE8 can do the job I want it to and some of the accelerators may actually accelerate the way I work with the web.

Apart from the variety of product and feature announcements made at Mix (don’t forget you can download the sessions here), the “one product to rule them all” is the Web PI 2.0 (I hope that the codename for this project was Magnum…)

It’s about this time of year – with all the new widgets and features in front of me – that I get a bit keyboard-twitchy and think about doing some coding demos. But then guys like MikeT and Tim Heuer are just too quick for my amateur skillz…

So instead, let’s take a look at Web PI. You can install from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads- selecting Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta.

A small download and a couple of UAC nags later and we’re presented with “What’s New?” and the available download options covering:

Platform – web server and extensions, frameworks and runtimes, database and tools. So this is anything from IIS7 and it’s variety of modules (such as IIS Media Services), to ASP.NET MVC, to PHP, to SQL Server, to Silverlight 3 tools.

Web Applications – the web application gallery has a bunch of useful applications that can be installed automatically – from BlogEngine.NET to Wordpress and Drupal.

As you select options, the installer notices what you’ve already got, and will inform of conflicts – so for instance I had the old RC of ASP.NET MVC which prevented me from installing 1.0.

And then off we go. A quick and simple way to get the bits and pieces you need to get going. Now just Expression Blend, and the plethora of CodePlex projects to install.

If you want to get moving with the web platform, I highly recommend an install.

Phew – long day yesterday as I was helping a bunch of fellow DPErs with the MWord in London – a little get-together to recap on the announcements from Mix.

I guess the main announcement yesterday was IE8 and there’s only one thing to say really: go get it.

Also loved the video.

From @stevecla comes news of this excellent deep-zoom-y experience for OneNote called Canvas. It’s a bit like pptPlex for PowerPoint but in this case for exploring your various notebooks. If you’re a OneNote junkie like me, then it is definitely worth a look-see.

I like the timeline view. I still think there is a lot of work in this space – particularly for collaborative research – but this is an interesting start for my general notes.

Loved this little vignette (click on the top right of the screen) for Visual Studio.

Not too sure on the legitimacy of the accent – I’ll have to ask @mikeormond

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…