"Mesh is the only thing that really makes sense out of a Yahoo
acquisition to me. Yahoo has rich content services—and they're
everywhere. If Microsoft could plug Mesh into that infrastructure,
fast, and flip the switch "Wow!" Imagine, for example, Mesh making
Flickr photos instantly available to all your PCs, cell phones and
TVs. Software plus hardware plus services."
But isn't that what the internets are for?
Carl Hewitt has a blog and an interesting History of Logic Programming. Also an interesting essay re: Wikipedia at http://wikicensored.info/
In addition to being such a simple and expressive language, Smalltalk should be known for its great collection of tools. Here's another one that was recently developed at UIUC, a Smalltalk Mecca...
Algernon was developed by Erik Hinterbichler and Joey Hagedorn with their CS598 classmates, working with Professor Ralph Johnson of the Software Architecture Group at UIUC. The developers say that Algernon provides lightning quick access to categories, classes, morphs, and global variables in your image, and is inspired by tools such as Quicksilver and LaunchBar for Mac OS X. Like Quicksilver, it learns from your behaviours, and will prioritise options that you use most often.
Michael Nygard posted about SAP's SOA capabilities. I wasn't sure if he'd appreciated their complexity, but he does emphasize that in a comment on this post here.
We're talking really complicated, WS-*-ish bits. My advice from hands-on experience two years ago would be: stop; walk back slowly, slowly; now turn and run; faster.
Not the kind of good system attributes I think of when reading Michael's book.
Roger von Oech via Gary King...
My mantra is “Look for the Second Right Answer.” This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years. Much of our educational system tries to teach us to look for the “one right answer.”I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, when I’m looking for information, this mantra tells me to go beyond the right answers that have worked in the past and look for others. When I’m trying to be creative, it playfully advises me to put my ideas in unusual contexts to give them new meanings.
Update: Keith Gaughan in the comments points out Yahoo is a FreeBSD shop primarily. I stand corrected. However I assume any "cloud" OS services would provide Linux as their primary platform. End.
The downside of MSFT dropping the bid is we don't get to see what their strategy would have been. Would they have attempted to migrate everyone over to the Windows platform? Really?
Would they have dropped the reported Yahoo move into providing cloud computing services? (I assume these would/will be based on Linux and open source generally. Who would do or could afford otherwise?)
How could MSFT purchase on open-source Linux based company without migrating to Windows or altogether dropping the open source Linux bits? I suppose they could move all the Linux bits to Novell / Suse. But that's still an endorsement of Linux generally, which in spite of the Novell arrangement MSFT still detests.
Do they just pull a 180 and hope to become a true Internet / Linux / OSS company over night? That would be *something*.
Sit back and think about it. Wow. Is Microsoft stuck in a bad place with the Internets or what?
From Dan Farber on CNet News: Google CEO Eric Schmidt and IBM CEO Sam Palmisano getting all, well, Googly-eyed with each other...
IBM is taking some of the learnings from the project and plans to operate a cloud that will allow partners to house their Web-based applications and sell them to customers, Palmisano said. "It is the first time we have taken something from the consumer arena and applied it to the enterprise," he said.Schmidt said that over time there won't be much differentiation between consumer and enterprise architectures. The major difference is that enterprise customers will pay for software and services, with required security and other features, and consumers won't...
Google's YouTube captures 10 hours of video every 60 seconds, and IBM might like that business if it could figure out how to make money at it. But eventually, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Google, and other big players will look more similar in their technical architectures and business models...
Currently, Salesforce.com is selling Google Apps as an integrated part of its platform. It's not far-fetched to think that Google would seek out IBM's help with its business partners to spread the Google word in the enterprise.
