If you were impressed by GMail, prepare for a surprise. Some very talented individuals have been creating demos that push the graphical power of Javascript and DHTML into the realm of 3D games. Of particular note are redbug (online demo, IE recommended) and neja.

Bonus: The author of neja, P01, has a brilliant technique for drawing lines, and explains it in a very lucid tutorial.

It's funny, but I'm still impressed as I watch browser-based apps pick up functions we used to think were limited to desktop software. This isn't going to stop, though, and pretty soon the web will be a platform that blends the best of client-server software and the best of desktop software. When that happens, Microsoft is going to be pissed off.

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Dave has an interesting story:

The first clue that something weird was happening at Microsoft around RSS was when Sean Lyndersay picked me up for dinner on the first night of my visit. I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

Update: You know what's ridiculous? CNET publishing this story about Dave's scoop. The story is inferior to Dave's post in every way: longer, less informative, uncontextualized, less fun to read, and surrounded by ads. Yet it contains only a tiny excerpt and one nearly-invisible link to Dave's story. Since Dave is the source, why not just link prominently and quote without worthless wholesale paraphrasing?

I know. The answer has something to do with the reporter's training and other cultural experience in a medium that rewards novelty, where scoops and angles made sense.

This sort of writing is not useful anymore. Writers, figure this out.

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As widely reported, Microsoft is buying collaboration software maker Groove Networks and making Groove co-founder Ray Ozzie Microsoft's CTO.

Groove offers an interesting platform for collaboration. Sold as "peer-to-peer", the key advantage is asynchronous communication. Which just means that you can catch up on what happened and send out a bunch of memos while sitting in a plane, and then get them all sent when you have network connection at the hotel. An unexpected but rich market for this has been Iraq reconstruction, an intensely collaborative environment where a stable network cannot be assumed. In concrete terms, it appears that Groove lets you share files, IM & hold virtual meeting with your coworkers, and track project statuses. Amusingly, their comparison sheets still highlight a cost advantage over… Microsoft.

Where does it fit in with Microsoft? Well, MS has been pushing groupware for years, especially in their cash-cow Office suite. In the past two revisions of Office, almost all significant features were to support networked collaboration. Of all Office applications, Outlook—email and calendaring—is the only one that hasn't become static. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint still come out with new versions, but the differences vary between judicious tweaks and tasteless augmentation of useless features.

For example, did you know that Office 2002 includes a discussions server that let your workgroup exchange comments on a central "Active Documents" server? Internet Explorer on my machine has a little post-it note icon that brings up an extra frame for this purpose—whose content is ironically blocked by the security features in Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is a potentially handy little feature, but it's utterly lost in the sea of gadgets and doodads that is MS Office.

Groove, however—because it wasn't developed under the tyrrany of Office's bottom line—stands on its own. It has enough features organized in a coherent way that IT departments might take it seriously, unlike an "Active Documents Repository" for a bunch of silly web comments. And it has lots of potentially valuable integration points with Outlook, which is by far the most ubiquitous manager of email, contacts, and calendars.

So Microsoft's challenge is to give future Office customers the power of Groove without saddling the program with lots of useless baggage. If they succeed, millions of Outlook users (including myself) will have a shot at a collaboration environment that doesn't suck. I think I wish them success.

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Did two hundred thousand people download the GIMP because of Microsoft's Windows Marketplace? Even stranger: 1.7 million have downloaded Firefox, whose IE-killer marketing message is reinforced in every user review on that page.

I'm going chalk this up as progress toward fulfilling my prediction that Microsoft will turn its internet channel to Windows users into an iTunes for software. Now they just need the software equivalent of white earphones…

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A great article on the upcoming Google/Microsoft architecture war, by Charles Ferguson of High Stakes, No Prisoners fame.

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How Microsoft tests ASP.NET 2.0. Hint: it involves 105,000 automated test cases, which are run on 1200 dedicated machines.

ASP.NET is probably the best web development framework out there—at least for the corporate market. This is one reason why; not a lot of companies other than Microsoft can invest that much in quality.

(After writing, Shimon checks the back of his neck. Hmm, no chip.)

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There are some great observations in this overly long essay.

One interesting trend is the shift of value away from software and toward the network effects surrounding software-based services. What this means is that while the software of ebay or amazon or orkut is fairly easy to clone, each of these businesses has its competitive advantage in the scale and involvement of its user base. The advantage is not in writing software, but in developing self-sustaining communities that invite and reward effective participation. This is dependent on software in roughly the same way that good cities are dependent on the layout of public spaces, roads, parks, transit networks, and buildings. Given enough money, you could clone all of these aspects of a city, but your clone wouldn't have any life until it was full of people constantly occupying the physical space and gradually reshaping it to fit their own lives.

In other words, skills now crucial in making software aren't taught in The Art of Computer Programming. If you want to make software, read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, or better yet, A Pattern Language.

There is also some grist for the prediction mill in this essay. Here are mine:

• Microsoft will ship open-source software within 10 years. Leading up to this point, they will transition to a business focused primarily on helping people find and use content (including software) created by third parties. Their software margins will crumble during this time period, but they may be able to sustain a profitable software business by driving quality up and cost down due to explosive growth in the number of devices that use software.
• Some interesting stuff is going to happen when people start figuring out how to commoditize network effects. This problem will require figuring out how to make software more responsive to user intentions, and less brittle at the mercy of incompatible formal interfaces. The driving forces in the next generation of programming systems will be social, not technical.

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Joe Beda, Microsoft's development lead for Avalon, has a response to the discussion around essays such as Joel Spolsky's How Microsoft lost the API war.

Why do people write web based client/server apps over writing rich client apps for Windows?

1. Frictionless deployment story
2. Cross platform interoperability
3. More fun to code — you can set up your own API system and abstract HTML to a large extent
4. Built in network/server awareness

You put all of these together and you have a pretty darn compelling story for many scenarios. How can the Windows client compete with this? The key is to take the good things of the web that we can (1, 3 and 4) and combine that with all of the goodness from having stuff run on the client. Don't get me wrong — I still believe in the web as a way to interoperate and exchange content and as a lowest common denominator for UI interaction. But we can do so much better than HTML with the horsepower that is sitting on our desk when it makes sense to do so.

The problem for Microsoft is that there is no compelling reason to remove #2 from this list. If you are making something that runs in a sandbox, does not depend on legacy windows APIs, is network-transparent, and uses high-level languages, you don't have to compile those languages into Win32 binaries. You might even be tempted to compile them to, say, Microsoft's .NET CLR, which is practically cross platform today.

If Microsoft figures out what features belong in Avalon and then makes it Windows-only, their features will quickly be cloned by cross-platform systems. Java will grow into this space quickly, and Novell will have plenty of time to develop a business here before Longhorn ever ships. These cross-platform clients will either support Avalon directly or provide a more appealing alternative (cross platform + free would beat Windows-only + expensive + bundled in Longhorn and thus taking 2 years to reach critical mass). The end result either way is that Microsoft will abstract away its most profitable market, the desktop OS.

So what's Microsoft to do? Go with the flow. The world is going to be deploying a lot more applications. They are going to have rich interfaces. They are going to be bought on-demand. They are going to evolve quickly. And there will be so many of them that consumers are going to need some way to shop around and take delivery from trusted sources.

To date, Microsoft has made one major step forward in improving the maintainability of their software. They created Windows Update. Windows update isn't novel; in fact, it's pretty primitive and limited to a single (though large) software product. But it is a huge win for both Microsoft and its customers: faster patch application means better security—good for customers and good for MS's reputation; a prolonged relationship with customers; more control of software even after it's shipped.

Windows Update could be even more useful if it applied to other products. Making Windows Update handle SQL Server service packs would certainly be considered an illegal anticompetitive practice, but it would be helpful to many. But opening Windows Update to other software vendors would be huge. Then, expanding Windows Update to support purchases of software—not unlike how Apple's iTunes supports purchases of music—would only be logical.

Like Apple with iTunes, Microsoft could take a cut of each sale; they could also charge for hosting patches. But also like Apple, they'd make their biggest cut selling more iPods Windows machines.

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What Free Software hackers need to know about Microsoft's competition strategy.

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Battelle reports on his visit to Microsoft and makes an interesting conjecture: the web is Microsoft's new platform strategy. What this means is that, foreseeing the commoditization of the OS, Microsoft wants to establish MSN and its major properties in communications (messenger, hotmail) and information services (search, content) as a basis for lock-in.

I don't buy that they've given up on the OS—Microsoft has too much leverage there at present to allow that kind of pessimism (or optimism, depending on who you ask). So, if it's not a replacement, can the MSN platform coexist with Microsoft's existing platforms: Windows and Office?

Of course it can. This is the classic Microsoft strategy: use dominant positions in existing markets as (1) a cash cow and (2) a way to enter new markets. Microsoft is extraordinarily powerful not just because of their size and wealth but because of the breadth of their assets: in virtually every realm of the software and internet industries, Microsoft is a potential competitor. Just like they used the Windows platform to push IE (and Media Player) to market dominance, they will use the IE, Office, and Windows platforms to push their search engine. If successful, they will leverage search to push other MSN products such as messenger, hotmail, and probably upcoming blogging and social networking services. In all of these realms, Microsoft will not bother to innovate. Secure in the knowledge that their virtually unlimited resources will allow them to clone or purchase the competition, they will wait and see what sells.

In this practice we see one key competitive advantage of Microsoft. Unlike other tech companies, they do not sacrifice themselves at the altar of innovation. Bill Gates' admission that Google kicked his ass isn't a moment of great character—it's a simple acknowledgment that the innovation part of search is over and the Microsoft part beginning.

But look at the big picture. What Microsoft really needs to defend against is the decentralization of software consumer decision-making. What I mean is the trend of individuals picking and choosing what tools they use on their computer. Microsoft is designed to make money selling batches of Windows and Office licenses to PC manufacturers and corporations. Compare this to the way people buy airline tickets or furniture: these are more commoditized services and the decision criteria are price and less quantifiable factors such as quality, reputation, and aesthetics.

So the risk to Microsoft is that web services—by nature decentralized, offering multiple choices of service provider—will become the focal point of computing instead of the desktop. They must walk a fine line between good-faith support and buzzword compliance while scheming to keep enough control to profit.