posted on Monday, April 16, 2007 7:34 AM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
Interview with Ray Ozzie
Good interview, "The Man Who Would Change Microsoft: Ray Ozzie's Vision for Connected Software", where Ray Ozzie talks about Microsoft changing to ship both software to the desktop and connected services.
He talks not about only "Software as a Service" but the combination and lifetime of software deployment.
"Ozzie: Well let me just start by saying that, in my view, we only have one shared future as a software industry. And that is centrally deployed code that has a different lifetime associated with it on the device it's deployed to.
So, what is HTML or DHTML? Most web pages have JavaScript in them. That's code that is delivered to the client and it has the lifetime of the browser instance you're using. Flash -- what is that? Well, it involves enhancing the browser runtime by downloading code. But it tethers those enhancements to the service and the lifetime of those things is still within the browser. With Apollo, maybe you can make the lifetime that of the user on that device. They have increased the lifetime from the browser instance to the PC.
All apps -- whether Win32 code, Flash code, managed WPF [Windows Presentation Foundation] code -- are going to have those lifetime choices and will all be centrally deployed, whether that central deployment is from an enterprise or from a service provider on the web. The concept of CD-based installs, floppy-based installs or USB stick installs are artifacts of a time when we were not fully connected.
So I don't see radical differences in the approaches that Adobe might be taking, that we're taking, or that the web industry in general is taking. The languages and run-times may be different. And we come at it from a history of the desktop coming up to the web. They are coming from a history of being on the web and going down to the desktop, but the endpoint is the same."
Interesting times, let's see how things pan out as revenue streams are split more and more by free and same vendor competitive products by different platforms...