As part of the new job, I’m involved in the planning a workshop called SPARK, which Dion Hinchcliffe blogged about this morning. (Dion also writes a blog here - bringing the total to three - so I created a combined feed just to keep track of all the places he writes). My new boss Mike also mentioned SPARK this morning. In the hopes of sparking futher interest (pun intended), here’s the overview of SPARK:

SPARK is the first in a series of high-level forums hosted by Microsoft that use a workshop setting to examine “the issues that matter most” in the practice of strategic architecture and produce guidance for the industry as a whole.

Today, new social movements, advances in technology, and forces within business are overlapping to create a landscape glutted with challenges and opportunities. In many cases, these forces have driven the deployment of new technologies and the adoption of new behaviors, adding multiple layers to an already complex set of issues that must be navigated. Architects are searching for a solution that helps manage this complexity.

SOA, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, and Edge are all elements of the solution, but are they the complete picture? Are they a sufficient answer to the issues?  Can they be used together in a productive and efficient fashion? What matters most?

When I wrote yesterday about the Browser as VM, I made the point that extensibility is difficult as we have four major browsers and multiple OSes to deal with. What Web 2.0 company is going to be willing to bet on a proprietary extension implemented in only one of those combinations? Not many if any I would guess. However, there is one option that works across all those browsers and OSes: Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Player.

Unlike the browser, where AJAX is a relatively new idea, Flash has been positioning itself as a platform for nearly four years. Instead of AJAX, Macromedia coined the term Rich Internet Application or RIA. RIAs share a lot in common with AJAX in that they are downloaded on demand, execute arbitrary script code and can retrieve data across the network. But the most interesting commonality that Flash has with the browser is that runs across multiple browsers and OSes.

In platform portability, Flash has succeeded where Java failed. I haven’t done enough research to know exactly why yet, but I suspect that it’s because Java tried to be a complete portable environment on day one where Flash focused on specific functionality that weren’t possible any other way – so called “skip intros” – and grew up from there. In other words, Java tried the top-down approach and Flash tried the bottom-up approach. I’m not surprised bottom-up worked and top-down crashed and burned.

While the modern browser has evolved to make it a capable platform, it still lacks some capabilities that Flash has. Most notably support for rich media. Thus, sites like Pandora, Google Video and MTV Overdrive need the capabilities provided by Flash.

While it’s hard to imagine enhancements to the browser due to the difficulties across four browsers and multiple OSes, improvements to Flash are easy to imagine. According to Macromedia, Flash has 98% penetration. Even more impressive is that Flash reaches 80% penetration with new versions of the player within 12 months.

Check out this post from Kevin Lynch for more on Flash for Web 2.0 companies. So far, the only Web 2.0 company I know about (which is to say I’m sure there are more out there) is Goowy. Which ones am I missing?

Note: this is the first in a series of Web 2.0 entries. I know I’m on record as hating the term Web 2.0, but as I wrote in that post, I do belief there is a fundamental shift underway in computing. The industry is calling this Web 2.0, and I can either spit in the wind or go with the flow. Furthermore, for the more Web 2.0 savvy among my readership, much of what I write about in this series may be old news. But I want to blog what I learn as I learn it, so bear with me.

Just as the dumb terminal was eventually replaced with more sophisticated personal computers, the dumb browser has been replaced on the modern desktop by something significantly more versatile. When the ability to process arbitrary script code was added to the browser, it became a virtual machine in its own right. Perhaps unique and special-purpose when compared to environments such as the .NET CLR, but a VM all the same. And while its unique nature makes the browser unusable for entire genres of applications – you’d never use the browser to build a server application for example – it makes it well tailored for user-centric, software as a service style applications that have become commonplace. While the browser’s scripting capabilities have been around since the mid 90s, the industry has only recently started to leverage those capabilities to build applications that run on the client inside the browser. Jesse James Garrett coined the term “AJAX” – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML – to describe this style of application.

If the browser is a virtual machine, that makes JavaScript the “assembly language” of the browser. That is, JavaScript is the lowest level of abstraction you can program the browser with.  This has pretty dramatic implications on the applications you build for the browser VM. For one, JavaScript is at a sufficiently high level of abstraction that you can use it directly and be productive. Writing an entire application in IL or Java byte code is unthinkable, but isn’t really a big deal for JavaScript. Furthermore, Because JavaScript is a text-based scripting language, protecting your code as intellectual property is extremely difficult. While obfuscators exist, in the end they can only delay the reverse engineering of your code, not prevent it. This encourages business models where the in-browser code has little if any value.

For example, the big mashup functionality these days is mapping. There are three big mapping services out there: Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo! Maps. 266 of the 368 mashups listed on ProgrammableWeb as I write this include mapping functionality from one of those services. That’s nearly three out of four. Mapping is interesting because of the sheer amount of data involved. In fact, the code is pretty useless without the back-end data. So while I can get the code for Google Maps, it does me no good without access to the data for which I need the API key. Contrast this with the complete lack of market for browser-based rich text editors. Sure, there are various open-source script libraries like Dojo, Web Wiz RTE and Kevin Roth’s RTE. But no companies offering a rich text editor service like they offer map services. Why is that? I would think the value of rich text editing would be even more widely applicable than mapping. The problem is that, unlike the map service, there’s no back end associated with a rich text editor. There’s no way to protect a client-side-only solution such as these rich text editors. The only people who do sell rich text editor components are ones who have integrated into some back-end programming environment such as Richer Components’ RichTextBox for ASP.NET.

The browser as a VM also has broad implications with regard to extensibility. Similar capabilities are delivered by the four major browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari) across the major operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD). So the question is, how will new capability evolve in the browser? Will the growing number of Web 2.0 companies looking to provide compelling features and differentiate themselves in the marketplace demand new functionality in the browser VM? Will one of the browser vendors be willing to take the heat of building proprietary extensions to their browser? I realize that many people have a dim view of proprietary extensions, but many features we take for granted today are de facto standards that arose from Microsoft’s proprietary extensions to IE. Most notable of these of course is XMLHttpRequest, without which “AJAX” would just be “J”. And JavaScript itself started life as a proprietary extension to Netscape before eventually being turned over to ECMA for standardization.

Now that I’m an Architect on the Edge (I’m thinking of putting that on my business card. Good idea or bad idea?) of course the first order of business is taking a closer look at “Web 2.0”. One thing leaps out at me right away – I hate the name “Web 2.0”.

First off, it’s a pure marketing buzzword. It was originally coined as a conference name. In a way, the fact that is has no underlying meaning is a good thing, because it gives people argue whether it really exists or not. In a way, it’s like the word “multimedia” back when we were first putting CD-ROMs into computers. There used to be lots of discussion if one thing or another truly was “multimedia”. Now, we don’t really worry about categorizing it as the marketing buzz around the term is long gone.

Secondly, I think it’s wildly arrogant to claim we’re only on version 2.0. The Internet has been around for 36 years. So everything before mid 2004 was Web 1.0 or earlier? And people are already talking about Web 3.0. Come on, let’s get real. The technologies that are driving the current revolution have been percolating for more than one major version of the underlying technology.

Finally, what’s with the version number anyway? One of the core principles Tim O’Reilly outlined was the “End of the Software Release Cycle”. Why are we using a holdover from the software release cycle days to indicate the end of the software release cycle?

Don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe that there is dramatic change happening in this industry. The way I explain my new job is to consider that one of the most basic axioms of distributed computing has been overturned.

From day one, all the computing power has been focused in the center. At first, the machines on the edge had no power at all – they were just dumb terminals. Slowly but surely, those machines at the edge started to become powerful in their own right. However, it’s only in the last seven to ten years that commodity hardware that was pervasive on the edge grew powerful enough to power the center. And it’s only in the last two or three years that the connection between the center and the edge grew fast and pervasive enough to make that edge power relevant.

The rules have changed. The power has shifted from the center to the edge. And we’re only just beginning to see the effects.

Maybe we should call it WebNT? 😄

So for the fourth time in seven months, I have a new manager. Way way way back and the end of June, I left marketing to be a solution architect. In doing so, I traded in Norman for John as my manager. Things were looking shiny but then Microsoft had a major reorg back in September. These big reorgs often cause small ripples, like the director of Architecture Strategy deciding to move back to a product group. John was promoted to head the team and Gianpaolo was hired to take over John’s previous role as head of solution architecture. Finally, it seemed like things were calming down on the management front, so I was caught off-guard by what happened next.

Last Monday, John offered me a chance to switch roles. We have spun up an Edge Architecture team to focus on the architectural impact of the next generation of computing – what some call “Web 2.0″ – and he thought I would be a perfect fit for the team. I agreed and jumped at the chance. So now I work for Michael Platt. Don’t let the infrastructure focus of Michael’s blog fool you – he incredibly deep on Edge Architecture and I am currently playing catch-up. The strangest thing so far is having to re-orient my thinking for consumer focused systems and away from the enterprise world where I have I’ve gotten the vast majority of my experience and where I have spent my entire Microsoft career to date.

In the immediate future, I’m been dumped into the MIX06 planning process. We have other stuff going on in the MIX timeframe that I’ll get to soon enough. I’m also re-thinking my personal presence. As my career progresses, the moniker “DevHawk” seems more and more outdated. Is it?