As I mentioned this morning, my brother went to Virginia Tech. In trying to come to grips with what happened in Blacksburg yesterday, he wrote the following and asked me to post it here.

My name is Ted Pierson and I am a Virginia Tech Alumni, member of the class of ’95. As I heard and watched the events that unfolded on Monday April 16^th, my heart broke for the families, students and faculty at Virginia Tech. While I lost no one that I knew personally, I feel that I lost 32 of my fellow brethren. The community of Virginia Tech reaches well beyond the confines of the campus, and we all feel a deep sense of pride to wear our Hokie Colors to show support for our beloved home. We also now feel a deep sense of loss. In the coming months, there will be many political debates as to how this could have been prevented, gun control and proper security measures. Please remember, this is more then a political issue to be debated, it is a humanitarian issue. There can be, and never will be a rational explanation to the horrible tragedy the felled the VA Tech campus yesterday. We as a society need to learn a love of our fellow man/woman. We need to look as a people, beyond the surface level issues that we deal with on a daily basis, and ask ourselves, is this the world we want to leave to our children, one that views the death of our fellow humans as trivial or platforms for political gain. The only lesson that we can learn from this is that we are all one race, one gender, one person, and that we need each other, regardless of race, creed, or other distinctions. I urge all readers of this to wear orange and maroon in a showing of support to the Hokie Nation. We are all Hokies today.

• My brother is a VaTech alumni, so the shock of the deadly shootings there yesterday hits very close to home. My heavy heart is with the grieving Hokie nation today.
• Jeff Atwood has a couple of greatposts on Language vs. Platform. Earlier in my MSFT career, I spent a significant amount of time explaining .NET, often to companies that had made a significant investment in Java. Picking the Java platform is fine (it’s almost the best platform around!), but it seemed many people I spoke to didn’t understand the fact that “[w]hen you choose a language, like it or not, you’ve chosen a platform“.
• Ian Thomas riffs on my When is a Service Not a Service post. I like Ian’s thinking about SaaS as an analogy for SOA adoption – if for no other reason that SaaS is easier to “get”. But trying to realize SOA via SaaS inside the enterprise is a mistake in my opinion (and I think Ian would agree with that). SaaS is a business model, and I don’t think you want to turn your enterprise into an internal service marketplace. Instead, this ties back with Nick Malik’s points about central planning. Regardless if I’m right or wrong, I subscribed to Ian’s blog (and not just because he linked to me – check out his Elements of the Future Business Ecosystem)
• TLA Watch: Oracle coins Application Integration Architecture (aka AIA). Joe McKendrick calls it “Big SOA”. Isn’t this the market segment that BizTalk has been in for seven years?

• I took my son to the Pacific Science Center this past weekend to see the Grossology exibit. His favorite was the barfing machine, but we also got to play Urine: The Videogame, stand inside a giant nose, work the burping machine, climb the scab wall and slide down the throat into the stomach and come out thru the colon. We also checked out the dinosaur exibit (Patrick’s favorite part: petrified dino poop), Kids Works and the Peter and the Wolf laser show. It was awesome.
• This week’s Big News^TM is the rebranding of WPF/E as Silverlight. Tim Sneath has the rundown, including the news that more news about Silverlight is coming at MIX. Personally, I think Silverlight is a great name. I was worried it was going to be another W*F name. (I’m waiting for the day that MSFT marketing tries to rebrand Win32 as the Windows Technical Foundation).
• Gianpaolo Carraro writes about what happens when a SaaS company bites the dust - i.e. “what happens to my data?” I expect that this is one of the aspects of SaaS that you have to weigh, though I doubt most companies will explicitly think about what happens if their SaaS provider goes belly up. As the SaaS market expands and more companies will go belly up (I agree w/ GP 100% that this isn’t SaaS specific, rather a natural force of any market) how much will that drag on SaaS adoption? I’m thinking it’ll be a fairly significant drag, but the SaaS market will eventually rebound.
• Nick Malik picks up the decentralization meme is started last Friday and compares enterprise architecture to city zoning boards. In general, I agree with Nick’s “not in a vacuum and not with a heavy hand” comment, but even more with his point that “we haven’t figured all it out yet.” Most EA efforts I’ve seen have been heavy handed and fairly divorced from reality (aka in a vacuum). More on this topic in the future.
• Kirk Evans closes the loop on city planning with a reference to Pat Helland’s Metropolis work. Pat’s work has been a huge influence on me. I often repeat Pat’s point about cities being “interconnected yet independent”. Services need to be interconnected yet independent also.
• Roger Wolter has a new Master Data Management whitepaper out, this one MDM hubs. I was literally talking about MDM on a conf call this morning, so Roger’s timing is impeccable.
• I haven’t read RADAR Architecture yet, but the fact that DAR in the acronym stands for “Dumb-Ass Recipient” made me laugh. (via Sam Gentile)
• MIT Media Lab has cointed the latest 2.0-ism: Human 2.0. I love Nick Carr’s take on it: “We’re definitely overdue for an upgrade – it seems like we’ve been stuck in Version 1.x for a few hundred thousand years, and that was after a beta that went on for freaking ever. Still, I think I’ll probably hold off until 2.01 or 2.02. I don’t want to be on the bleeding edge for this one.”

• My friend Christoph Schittko (who used to blog here, but hasn’t written anything in almost two years) recently wrote on an internal email thread that he “wonder[s] how many more attempts for “enterprise wide” thingies we need for people to figure out that there’s too much complexity involved to coordinate anything enterprise wide.” I couldn’t agree more, though I think it’s more than just complexity at work here. There are significant forces driving decentralization in society in general and IT in particular, and anything enterprise wide is by definition centralized.
• I’m way behind on this, but Ray Ozzie did an fascinating interview with Knowledge@Wharton. I was especially interested in his separation of “big-I” and “small-i” innovation. Sounds like disruptive and sustaining innovation from The Innovator’s Dilemma to me.
• According to Mary Jo Foley, my ex-teammate Mike Walker is “da man” on Office Business Applications, or OBA’s.
• I think I have an old PocketPC hanging around in a drawer somewhere. Apparently, I can use it as a caller ID server instead of gathering dust. That’s sorta freaky. (via Backstage @ MED)
• Quote of the Day: “If you have a live show on a TV network, Its not good to have a brain fart during a slow news week.” – Mark Cuban. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other about Don Imus, but Mark’s points about the conservatism of media corporations are spot on.

It’s a slow Thursday.

• BPEL 2.0 has been approved as an OASIS standard. John Evdemon from my old team has the details. As I’ve written before, I think the spec is too heavily focused on executable process and not enough on abstract process. But I guess congrats are in order none the less.
• Notepad2 v2 is out. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t support user defined syntax schemes. I wonder if the switch from GPL to BSD license might encourage someone to add that support? (via Larkware)