Gates has left the building

Bill gates has announced that he will be withdrawing from his day to day activities as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. This is supposed to happen as a gradual move, completing in 2008 and Ray Ozzie (creator of Lotus Notes and Groove) will be replacing Gates as Chief Software Architect.

While Gates will remain as Chairman of Microsoft he will no longer be involved in product design and development, moving off to concentrate on philanthropic work being done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What affect this move will have in the future of Microsoft and how its products evolve is uncertain, but I am certainly not alone in thinking that Microsoft will never be the same without Bill Gates. His participation in product design and architecture is still very strong to this day, 31 years after the company's creation.

Ray Ozzie, who will succeed Gates as Chief Software Architect is certainly nothing short of brilliant, as demonstrated by the Notes and Groove products he created, but will his influence maintain Microsoft in the path laid down by its founder or will it take the company into an entirely new direction?

Google Office is here

I've written about Writely in this blog, first as an independent company and later as a newly acquired part of Google. I've used writely, personally, over a couple of months and though it is, obviously, not on par with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org's Writer it is very much functional, usable and useful.

After acquiring Writely, Google has made generally available its Calendar service, which along with its GMail service offer a good measure of the functionality found in Microsoft's Outlook email and groupware client. Now, a new service, Google Spreasheets comes into the light of day and having used it for a pair of days I can say that it, also, is quite usable and useful.

For all practical purposes, an individual who has access to these services for free has no need to acquire a license of Microsoft Office for their personal use. Though I would even begin to consider comparing functionality between Excel and Google Spreadsheets, I find that for simple, personal finance and budget controls Google's service is quite sufficient.

When taken into consideration as a set of applications, instead of separate services, GMail, Calendar, Writely and Spreadsheets form a sizeable chunk of a personal productivity suite and offer free online storage for your information, making it available to you from where ever in the world you might be. For all practical purposes I think it is safe to say that Google Office is already here.

What's next? Humm.... Anybody see a startup doing an online presentation service?

To awaken a sleeping giant

Developing web applications has been fundamentally different from developing traditional software, right from the beginning. These differences and the need to learn a whole new set of skills has kept many programmers from fully embarking on the web bandwagon.

These are, generally, corporate and independent software vendor (ISV) developers who are making an adequate compensation at their jobs and have not bothered to learn how to use web specific tools. You might say that after all this time, since the inception of the Internet in our lives, there are not so many people in that position. Well, you might surprise your self...

I have talked to several such developers over the last couple of years and I believe that there are millions of people who are in that precise condition. Recently, some of these people have taken a new interest in Web development, due to the introduction of toolkits (libraries, compilers, IDEs) that bring web development closer to the mindset of the traditional developer.

As more and more tools that follow this path become available, more and more these developers that have been asleep for the web development universe will begin to stir. As these tools reach maturity we might discover that they will bring a huge lot of new blood into web applications development.

This huge mass of traditional software developers will enter this new universe using sophisticated tools that expand the borders of web application development, bringing new ideas, not marked by years of working with "normal" web tools such as HTML editors and scripting languages. This sleeping giant might just be about to awaken.

Interesting times should lay ahead...