Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

According to Ray Ozzie's recent memo to other M$ employees/developers, the chief strategy for Ozzie seems to be moving away from OS based systems and doing more on the web side.  I had long ago written (sorry about the punctuation) about the move away from pure client computing to distributed services.  I think we'll still struggle to certain degrees between privacy and security for a while.  It's inevitable.

However, in M$ embracing the web full throttle, that implies (for me at least) that my net value has actually risen.  Sounds odd interjecting such a statement/idea in a situation where someone is proclaiming a massive change in course for the largest software company in the world.  Yet think closely on that statement.

The shift in focus basically means that people programming pure client applications or even two tiered, client-server apps are pretty much obsolete and that we need to now focus on what I've been doing for the past nearly 9 years.  Or is this really true?

I honestly don't see much of a difference in general in the paradigms.  The basics are the same.  Ask for some data.  Send some data.  Display some data.  And nuke some data.

The major difference is that we're using massively distributed networks with more open standards, and mechanisms for exchanging what used to be more proprietary systems.  We'll be focusing on increasing the depth and richness of data being exchanged as well as increasing the stability of the platforms by utilizing the concepts of cloud computing.

What I don't think people realize here is that what we ought to be doing is trying to diversify the types of information/services out there.  Obviously, there's going to be a lot of replication going around and I see that being just as bad as having spaghetti code inside a single, omnipresent file with no abstraction.  In other words, replication is a bad practice in the web services as well because we're simply not being economic and ecological in that sense.

Maybe I'm getting cynical and old.  It's like that saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."  Yeah, we get a little more redundancy, but I want to see rich services with tons of details that we can mine for useful information that helps progress computing, rather than just rebuilding what we've done in the past.

And regarding my paycheck, I'm hoping that Ozzie's validation of the web increases my salary in the near future because I didn't spend the last 9 years sacrificing late nights in trying to be competitive for nothing.