Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Its getting real close to the Web Services DevCon, being put on by Chris Sells. Chris reminds me that any of my readers and friends can get a 50% discount so I'd like you all to consider it and let me/us know. I can't say enough great things about this conference: its intimate, cheap, real, pragmatic, focused on the people really doing the work and not the marketers. Its a bargain at $445 and a steal and half of that! Your head will spin with all the great info. The thing you may be thinking: I've been to conferences and they are filled with marketing fluff. Not this one. Everyone presenting is really down in the trenches doing the work, making Interop happen, etc. That's why its called a DevCon. Do it. Its worth it. 8:14:27 PM

Head of Microsoft Research Rick Rashid talks about ongoing MSR projects "Sideshow" is the internal name for a project in which the company has developed an application that displays a series of windows with useful information on a user's desktop. Using XML and Microsoft's .Net Web services technology, Sideshow can reach out to the Web, corporate servers, or the computer's hard drive and provide quick views of data relevant to the user. Sideshow team has published the project paper last month that described "notification and awareness platform". It looks like intelligent dashboard that apparently is being regularly used internally at Microsoft by 7000 users. Integrated in Office, this kind of tool will represent dramatic evolution of personal dashboard. I predict Office people are or will be working on productizing this. Groove team should definetely take note. [via Alexis Smirnov] [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog] 3:32:41 PM

The flow from Joel's Platforms story to mine continues at a steady pace, as do the side-conversations in eMail and Groove.  Apparently, Joel has a number of readers who are interested in the dynamics of software platforms and the platform business. Many of us gray-haired people who have worked in the software industry for decades have independently developed conceptual frameworks for how the platform business operates. Patterns began to emerge in the very early IBM mainframe era, and have been further developed by most every platform vendor since. Given the level of interest, I thought that I'd share with you a document, entitled "Software Platform Dynamics", that I've used in the past to help associates get up to speed with the nature of the software platform business. It's a fairly dense collection of thoughts gathered over many years; I hope that it serves to further the discussion... [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] 1:31:31 PM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.