Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….

Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing and Spider in equal proportions. I scan the incoming alerts for mail on my main machine and only click into the inbox now and then. Over the weekend or on the road, unless I’m waiting for a reply from a friend or an editor, I ignore my email for a lot of the day. Yes, I get sucked into just getting through my inbox when I should be getting on with work a little too often, but I don’t feel actually addicted.

I do feel that far too many things that ought to have a proper workflow slosh over into email; you could save a lot of time by using SharePoint to store documents that you want people to review or using a self-service portal to book travel or update your detail with HR rather than putting unstructured info in an email that someone else has to transfer into an application later anyway. Automate the bits of the approvals process that currently rely on someone pulling out their BlackBerry on the train to give a routine ‘yes’ and you might be surprised what speeds up in your company.

Just as bad are the cc wars, where cc-ing people is a political chess move; I save it for a very, very few strategic emails myself, but then I don’t work in a department any more.

I agree with Jeremy Burton, the CEO of Serena about a lot of things like business mashups being the future of many line of business applications; they’re the Excel macros of Web 2.0. But, as I was reminded when I was writing a case study on him for an up-coming feature, he’s also the guy who invented no-email Friday when he was running Veritas. It’s good to pace yourself – I like quoting Charmaine Eggbury of RIM, who told me that “the most important button on any BlackBerry is the off button”. If you’re actually addicted and it’s interfering with other work tasks or your personal life, then maybe an enforced break will make you reconsider. I don’t agree that forcing people not to send and read email is realistic in today’s business world. An executive who finds they can get away without email probably has someone else picking up the slack, and last time I saw Jeremy he certainly had his BlackBerry to hand (although connecting to Gmail rather than Exchange as an experiment).

Does email suck up more time than I’d really like? Definitely. Could I give email up for a week and still have any work coming in? Probably not. What I really want it more tools like SNARF and Xobni that let me deal with the key messages without spending time wading through messages that can be filed unread in case I ever need the information in them.

My name’s Mary and I have 1,289 unread messages in my inbox.

Rising oil prices and financial uncertainty might not be the only reasons the electricity that runs your data centre could get more expensive. A cold winter might mean brownouts and blackouts, which means now is a good time to check your UPS capacity.

It took 21 gigawatts to send Marty Back to the Future. Britain generates 70-74gW on its own but with six out of ten nuclear power stations out of action and the usual ‘routine maintenance’ we’re down to about 57gW. That’s fine as long as the weather stays mild, but if we get an early cold snap demand could peak around 62gW. It’s more likely that the energy companies will just buy more electricity from France and put the price up to compensate than that we’ll see energy rationing or unexpected power cuts. Either way, you need to plan ahead.

Should you really worry? Owen Cole, the technical director at F5 Networks, thinks so. “There is currently debate around whether the UK faces a real electricity shortage in the near future. Given that there is credible, independent research to suggest there is a real threat, enterprises have no choice but to incorporate this scenario into their business continuity and disaster recovery planning  They cannot assume consistency of power supply. Strategic planning should incorporate a two-fold approach - working out firstly how to conserve energy, and secondly how to use energy more efficiently without affecting the business.

“Modern data centres can use the equivalent energy to small towns.  Given the huge amount of power involved, heat efficient resources must be considered to allow power conservation, so if electricity supply is cut, backup generators can use this excess energy to help ensure critical operations are running.  On the usage side, imperatives include reviewing options around the dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of equipment on a per-need basis, thereby using only necessary power.”

When I looked into green IT at the beginning of the year, it was rare for CTOs or IT directors to pay the power bills for the data centre or even now what they add up to. That’s changing, not least because of the money involved. And a good thing too; you can’t work out how to save money until you know what you’re spending it on. Do the measurements and find out what really saves you power - because for every gallon of fuel you save the company on telecommuting, you’ll have an associated cost for running the network, servers and conferencing equipment.

It’s the same with thinking about nuclear power; you can say that the problems with nuclear plants mean we need to build newer and better ones, or that they’re endemic to the nuclear energy industry and we need to look at other solutions. Personally I fancy the idea of a cable from Iceland; selling the output of its hydroelectric and geothermal resources should produce a better income stream than high-interest savings accounts…
Mary 

It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.

“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”

Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.

Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”

If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.

-Mary

It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.

The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.

The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really well, you’re only spending 35% keeping the lights on and if you’re supremely ambitious you want to get that down to 20%; maybe that’s the 7-10% of companies that Tom Hogan guestimates have already got their IT automated.

After all, why should the majority of your budget go on doing the same thing over and over again so that the business can stay where it was last month? You should have the routine automated; it will stop you losing staff to sheer and utter boredom too. But once you plug everything in enough to automate it and track it  - not just in terms of transaction throughput or whether the next laptop you buy will trigger a discount if you buy it from vendor H instead of vendor I but who has a problem, who’s about to have a problem, who’s working on it right now and who has already spent how long fixing what on what annual salary -  you can also start to put a value on it.

The next time you ask for a new server, you can show how much it’s costing to chug along on the old one - and what difference you’ve made with the last budget you were allocated. You can show which SLAs the IT team has met and what that means in cold hard cash. When you get asked to do too much with too little, instead of sucking your teeth like a builder you can say exactly what it will cost to do properly and what they can get for the money they want to spend. You can even tell the business what projects are a bad idea before you plug in a single server.

It’s not rocket science; a good project has high value to the business, a small cost to implement and a low budget requirement. The IT department spends the whole year putting in systems that let the rest of the business evaluate business ideas and existing services in those terms; isn’t it about time you had that for yourself too?
-Simon

Cloud computing will shine on SSD, but your free storage might go away when it does.

The reason you get free storage on Gmail and SkyDrive and Mozy and flickr and all the other Web 2.0 services isn’t just to keep up with all the other Web 2.0 services. It isn’t just to draw in visitors who can see and click ads. It’s because when you use hard drives, especially cheap, consumer grade hard drives, to run your search engine on, the only way to make that storage fast enough is to leave most of it empty.

The hard drives that Google stacks together are never more than 25% full, because any more than that and the latency to get the information back off is just too slow to make the search effective and slap the ads on it. The other 75% is just sitting there spinning around on the platter and making you happy by putting your files on there for free makes sense.

You don’t need access often enough to slow down Google’s own accesses and Google can queue your request up to retrieve when it’s convenient - your Internet connection isn’t fast enough for you to notice.

SSD is still expensive, but it could save a lot of money for enterprises and Web services because it’s lower power. For a notebook PC you care about 15% longer battery life - if Intel’s figures carry over to real PCs; for a data centre, you care about Watts/IOPS and Intel is claiming SSD can offer six times the read performance using 98% less power and needing only 75% of the space - because you can put cooler drives closer together without space for fans and AC. That means SSD should quickly start to become common. But that could also mean the end of ever-increasing free online storage.

On the one hand, SSD is fast enough that latency is much less of a problem, so you don’t have to leave most of it empty. And on the other, it’s expensive enough that you don’t want to leave any of it empty. 

Did you ever have one of those days when everything seemed to be getting bigger?

I recently put the largest machine we’ve ever had onto our office network. A 64-bit server, with 6GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, it’s taken on the role of handling all our mail and files. When a new desktop PC arrives later this week, there’ll be over 7TB of storage on this small office network.

Just a couple of years ago we were surprised if we had more than 500GB of storage in an office. Turning back the clock still further, I helped design a UK-scale photo storage service, where we had a hierarchical storage system with a whole 3TB of spinning disk and 30TB of fast tape. Today’s fast external drives are making that architecture obsolete - our new server is using eSATA to do a whole server backup onto a 500GB drive. That back up? It only takes 30 minutes…

Outside out office the usual run of press releases seem focused on delivering larger and larger numbers. Cuil’s leaked launch (and the claimed size of its index) led Google to claim that it had indexed over 1 trillion web pages. That’s a pretty big number - 10 to the power of 12. It’s also the approximate number of bacteria living on the human body.

Closer to home, BT is claiming that it’s hooked up just under 17 million homes with broadband connections. It turns out that there aren’t many more homes to be connected, with broadband analysts Point Topic suggesting there are only around a million households that can migrate to broadband left - and around 9.6 million that don’t have internet access at all. The days of massive growth in broadband are behind us now, and what was a luxury is rapidly becoming a commodity. It would be interesting to see the spreadhseets at BT, as the company juggles the numbers to see how it can make money from running the data pipes.

After all, there’s plenty of scope for bringing the world online. Gartner recently suggested that there were over a billion PCs in use around the world (and soon there’ll be a billion transistors in each processor, thanks to Intel). While getting to a billion PCs in 30 years may seem a lot, there’ll be another billion in just 6 years, thanks to 12% annual growth. There
’s a lot of scope for significant social change here, as the emerging world (and especially the BRIC nations) start coming on line. The anglophile web will become just a part of a global, multi-lingual web - after all, even without the iPhone, China Mobile subscribers use more mobile data than any other network.

With all those machines, and all that information out there, there’s an issue of managing the information - and manging the storage it requires. The BBC has just such a problem.

The archive is currently managing about 700,000 digital items, with most of it still on discrete media (digital video tape, CDs, DVDs). There are about 280,000 actual master files, digitised from U-Matic video and 1/4″ audio originals, and from magnetic sound tracks. Then there are 60,000 viewing-quality video files, but these are held on CD-ROM in anticipation of a mass storage system. Overall they’re managing 12 petabytes, mainly on digital videotape - with a growth rate of about 400 terabytes a year, mainly on digital videotape.

If the numbers in your office are getting to big, be glad you’re not dealing with any of the really big numbers out there!

I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon

Well, Tim O’Reilly has an idea, because he came up with the term. And the new O’Reilly Web 2.0 consulting practice ought to know. In fact one of the reasons the company set up the consultancy arm is to get everyone to agree on a definition, because we can’t have a good conversation about the  benefits Web 2.0 can bring business if we mean something different.

Some people think of Web 2.0 as just about social networks or about sharing user-generated content. By other definitions, anything built with Ajax is Web 2.0, but that would make Outlook Web Access the first ever Web 2.0 service. Is it just having a blog? That doesn’t make Dell a Web 2.0 success. O’Reilly’s original definition was coined before Facebook or YouTube and before blogs were popular and it doesn’t depend on a particular programming language or style. He wanted to explain why Amazon was so successful, why eBay dominated online auctions, how Google was beating everyone else at search. His answer was that they were mining what users thought about the books they were buying, the people they were buying from and the Web pages they linked to and turning that into information for other users.

Web 2.0 is a combination of collective intelligence and network effect, taking user-generated content and metadata and using it to add value, creating applications that get better the more people use them. “Every true Web 2.0 company,” says O’Reilly, “is building a database that grows better with the number of participants.”

Social networks and blogs and interactivity on the Web site are all part of that, but the heart of it is much more structured data. So far, the big Web 2.0 success stories have mostly been companies that started online. If Web 2.0 is really that significant it should help companies who’ve been around for decades as well; how does a blog help if you make shoes or run a phone company? Mostly by letting you turning your customers into unpaid consultants.

The O’Reilly consultants have a fund of amusing mistakes by companies that didn’t get the point, from AT&T saying they wanted to reach out to unhappy customers who were ready to move to another provider - but didn’t want to create a community just to listen to people complaining - to a large consulting firm that was horrified at the idea of letting customers talk to each other.

There was the watch company that cancelled plans to send out images of a new watch to key bloggers because they didn’t want to spoil the effect of their million-dollar launch party and had to watch a grainy picture from a cameraphone go round the blogs instead - making the watch look cheap and nasty. One large retailer declares confidently that ‘none of our employees use Facebook’; that means they’re not in the ‘I hate working here” group trying to find out what’s wrong with the company. Another retailer is spending $2 million on research about shoppers that it won’t see for 13 months, when it will be completely out of date.

A blog won’t fix a company that makes bad products or has terrible customer service; but having a way to hear what customers are saying and respond to it can - if the company is actually able to change. “Going Web 2.0″ for the sake of looking up to date is pointless; using technology to build a relationship with customers is valuable. 

Is any of that the same as Web 2.0 for online services? Not really. And the O’Reilly folks actually admit that. When they talk to a company, they use the term ’social Web’ because Web 2.0 is ‘distracting’.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. You can put up a Facebook page, send spam, pretend to be a bank; as long as you can read distorted characters, you can leave comments on a blog under any name you choose (I’d like to see at least one Mickey Mouse commenting to this post). Passwords are well past their sell-by date but proving your identity securely matters more and more. Identity online covers everything from throwaway accounts on forums to online banking and no one system is every going to ‘win’ - but they can learn to work together.

You can buy a hard drive from any vendor you like; as long as it fits in your PC and uses a standard interface, your operating system will take care of accessing the hardware and loading the drivers, leaving you to enjoy the storage space. The identity metasystem will do the same thing for user information, identity providers and sites that accept user details in the form of information cards. The terminology comes from Microsoft, the impetus comes from a wide range of customers and the technology comes from everybody from Oracle to Sun, IBM to Novell, the Liberty Alliance to the Higgins Project. Does it all work together yet? Not quite - but the Project Concordia interoperability workshop that opened the RSA conference today was a step forward.

Not least because for the first time Sun demonstrated an information card logon that used no Microsoft software at all; Sun’s Pat Patterson showed a system using OpenSSO v1 build 4 - which Sun will ship in the summer as Federated Access Manager 8.0, with an Oracle identity provider and Novell’s identity selector to deliver the same experience of logging in with an information card as a Vista user gets on the system using CardSpace.

Microsoft showed CardSpace sending SAML 1.1 and SAML2 tokens to a WS-Federation system. Ashish Jain of Ping Identity demonstrated a system using an information card from Sun to log into Gmail, running Vista in a virtual machine on a Mac talking to a Linux system. And systems from Ping, SymLabs, FuGen and Shibbloeth talked to each other and to Sun, Oracle and Microsoft systems using WS-Federation and SAML, transferring not just the identity of the user from a managed information card provided by a trusted identity provider rather than one the user had created themselves but also information like whether the user had provided a password or a smartcard rather than just clicked on a link.

Who needs that heterogenous a system? General Motors for a start, which is why Bob Haar, an IT architect at GM was chairing the workshop along with Microsoft’s Mike Jones and Eve Maler from Sun. Jones repeated what Microsoft is hearing from customers; “Some of the more interesting business discussions have been about risk. Certainly in the automotive industry, a decision has been made that there’s both at least cost savings and possibly minimisations of risk by going to federated authentication for collaboration with suppliers. Think about how many companies are involved in building a GM automobile or a Boeing airplane; it’s mind boggling.”

Haar explained that in a little more detail. “We think the federation gives us more control in real time to monitor and control access. There are legal and contractual aspects of setting up the business relationships and supporting for activities about auditing - if there’s a question about who changed this financial data or when it came through the federated environment, we have to have systems and procedures in place to make that happen.”

Sun’s demo didn’t use any Microsoft products at all and Patterson took something of a cheap shot by apologizing to Microsoft for that. Mike Jones smiled back and said actually, Sun had given him two of his three wishes. “I said three years ago we’ll know the metasytem is succeeding when interactions occur that use no Microsoft software, where Microsoft receives no revenue and Microsoft has no idea the interaction is taking place.” Today, the point is for the companies to be talking so they can make this all work. When it does all work, Sun wouldn’t need to tell Microsoft anything to have happy customers who could use CardSpace against a system that uses Oracle to issue identity information to connect through to another system that uses ADFS to do it. Assuming ADFS could issue and understand identity beyond Active Directory…

There isn’t a name for the next version of ADFS, or a shipping date but Microsoft promises, it will issue and consume information cards. This has gone in and out of the feature list for the next version of ADFS as shipping schedules and priorities shifted, but it’s back on the table says Jones - and Visual Studio will get tools for working with identity. “We probably wouldn’t have gotten permission to show SAML2 token support in the next version of our identity server products if we were not going to put tools into deployers hands to easily build and consume these tokens. We get that until it’s easy for developers to do this, a lot won’t. We’re looking at federation and information cards not as separate things but as parts of a spectrum people can deploy as it makes sense for them.”

Standards are good, runs an old joke; that’s why we have so many of them. Whether it’s a proprietary approach that’s become popular enough to document or a philosophical difference in approaches, there’s hardly anything in technology that you can’t do in two completely incompatible ways by following different standards. What’s happening in identity is a remarkably grown-up approach to tackling a problem. When did you last see Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Novell and Oracle playing nice together without government interference? Instead of expecting to own the marketplace, all the major players are putting in the effort to get their systems working with each other and with the standards. Imagine if all the effort spent arguing about whether OOXML and ODF could both be ISO standards had gone into writing translators to move documents between the two.

But once it’s easy for a service to accept identity logons from a variety of information providers, what is the user experience going to look like? The test sites had buttons to log on with every combination of service and they exposed the debug information so you could see what was happening; real sites won’t have that. But they shouldn’t have umpteen buttons to choose which information provider I want to use either; that way madness and another set of chances to get me to do something insecure lie.

Every credit card I have has its own branding, and there are plenty of different card readers in shops, but they all have a slot I put the card into and a keypad where I type in the PIN. I don’t have to press a button saying I want to use a MasterCard or an Amex card before I start - I put in the card and the reader works it out, hides the process and asks me for the important thing, my PIN. Sites using identity should do the same thing. Don’t give me a button for OpenID or SAML or Ping or Oracle or whatever underlying identity system I’m going to use happens to be, and make me click it and then click again to pick an information card. Use the same identity selector I’m going to give you my information card in; that way your Web site doesn’t have to have five otherwise identical pages and CardSpace or the Higgins identity selector or whatever the experience is on my OS and browser can do the hard work. All I have to do is say yes, I do want to use this information card with this site and you can concentrate on building something that works better because you know who I am without either of us having to care about passwords.

With Firefox 3 around the corner, and IE 8 in beta, perhaps its time to call this round of browser wars over before they’ve begun. Adobe’s put a line in the sand today with the beta of Photoshop Express, and there’s no way a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript browser can ever cross it - no matter how much of ACID3 it can render.

Why?

Microsoft and Adobe are pushing innovative web application development outside the browser into cross-platform runtimes that deliver everything that Java promised. HTML is obsolete, and all we really need is the <object> tag.

One of the big announcements at Microsoft’s web development conference Mix08 was the public beta of Silverlight 2. It’s another salvo in the developing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies are treading on the same path as they struggle to find direction in the developing software as a service world. Adobe’s made its latest step today, with a Flash-based in-browser version of Photoshop built using its Flex platform. Both companies are targeting developers with their rich internet applications strategies, offering platforms for next generation web applications that go beyond the limitations of HTML and web browsers.

Silverlight 2 is Microsoft’s first cut at a high-performance in-browser rich internet application platform. Flash may well perform well if you’re using the Flash 9 player, but noit everyone writes well-architected Flex applications, and the Flash/Flex designer/developer dichotomy is a tricky one to deal with. Not everyone can write an application like Photoshop Express, and the capabilities of Flash are being lost in a morass of advertising animations that mean a lot of influential users block Flash from their browsers completely…

Microsoft is watching Adobe carefully, and it’s trying not to make the same mistakes. While Silverlight is designed to be used by advertisers (and comes with plug-ins suitable for most analytics platforms), it’s also developer friendly. Install Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 2 SDK and you’ve suddenly got a tool that lets you write C# code that runs at desktop speeds inside a browser - and on Macs as well as Windows boxes. There’s no point in codeing for a host of incompatible browsers if you can target a plug-in that’ll work across a sizeable set of your target userbase.

You’re going to need to write code if you’re planning on using Silverlight in anger. Deep Zoom, one of the Mix 08 Silverlight announcments, may only take a line of code to implement in your XAML - but you’ll need a lot more in the associated code to actually work with browser, mouse and keyboard to actually handle the zooming… Microsoft is a developer-focused business, and even though its attempting to redress this with its Expression family of tools, you’re going to need Visual Studio to get the most out of Silverlight.

Photoshop Express is a good idea - and a powerful tool. Could you build it in Silverlight as well as Flash/Flex? The answer’s quite simple: Yes. It’d probably run faster too, as Silverlight has a threading model that’s not there in the current generation of the Flash player. This time next year, well, who’s to say. Flash 10 will have probably changed the game yet again. One things certain: you couldn’t build it in HTML.

There’s something for everyone in the competing RIA platforms. That’s a good thing, as it’ll mean better user experiences for everyone - and a step back from the current round of browser wars. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe wil take competition outside the browser and into the development platform. The next step, well that’s most likely to happen where it’s needed most - server side.

–Simon