Rich Client Wars

Much is being written today about the future of the Rich Client application versus the browser applicaiton. One side says you can't get a good user experience out of a browser application, and you can't get sub-second response time from it either.

There are those at the other extreme as well. The say there is nothing the browser can't do and notuing it shouldn't do.

I suggest that truth lies in the middle. I also think that the middle will shift over time - towards the browser side.

This posting at looselycoupled, by Phil Wainewright, talks about how the Yahoo purchase of Oddpost is an indicator of things to come - delivery of rich user interfaces within the browser. His main point is that Microsoft's Avalon is the wrong direction for the company to be taking.

He may be right. Time will tell. I think Microsoft has surely thought about that. I think they are hedging their bets - make the borwser irrelevant. Where you really wnat to work is in Microsoft Office (with a healthy serving of Sharepoint Portal Server and BizTalk server to help it out). Take a look at their Office Information Bridge. If Microsoft could get us to live in a purely MS-Office world, then the browser becomes irrelevant, as does Google, Yahoo, IBM, Sun, Java and Linux. Apple would still be around - after all it does run Office, and the Microsoft marketing department needs Macs to publish their material (look at the document properties for their PDFs - you'll often see something like "Mac OS X 10.3.4 Quartz PDFContext")!

Microsoft Project Competitor Released under Open Source License

A company called Niku previously sold a product called workbench that was a serious competitor to Microsoft's Project. How serious? It sold for $10,000 a seat according to this InformationWeek report.

Despite the price tag, it was not a major revenue contributor, so Niku decided to release most of the code to the community under a Mozilla license. The product contains a few licensed components from others that cannot be released, as well, they will not release the source for their scheduling algorithm - which they may patent. They will distribute the binary for that piece. You can find out more at the web site.

Steve Ballmer commented in his corporate email that "Microsoft needs to do a better job of convincing customers that the latest versions of its products are worth having" (clipped from cnet). OpenWorkbench for free, or Microsoft Project for US$600 - Microsoft has its work cut out for it!