I was just talking to Michael Arrington about some Web 2.0 stuff when I realized I’ve been blogging for three years now. I started blogging three years and two weeks ago. Doesn’t seem that long ago I was sitting in a Phoenix hotel room putting the finishing touches on the blog engine that powered the first version of DevHawk. (I moved over to DasBlog just under a year later.) But in reality, there’s been two kids, a new house, four roles, five managers and a move to campus since I launched my DevHawk Blog. Quite a ride!

I got an email this morning from Richard Veryard wondering if I should now be called EdgeHawk. That’s funny. Alas, EdgeHawk.com is “Your #1 internet Hoosier Racing Tire source” so I think I’m going to stick with DevHawk…at least for now.

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? 😄

The hardware failure that caused DevHawk to be down in early December also took out my wife’s blog TechieWife. But she just started up a new TechieWife MSN Space. Subscribed (of course).

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?