Office Home And Business 2010 Can Microsoft morph

Even before Google hired absent from Microsoft 1 with the preeminent developers of Windows last year,Office 2010 Key, speculation more than when and regardless of whether Google may well launch a “GoogleOS” has been rampant. (And is still ongoing, in spite with the Google brass’ attempt to throw cold water on the idea.) However, I haven’t seen Microsoft observers mull a similar question: What if Microsoft were to do something similar? What may well Windows look like if it were available in Internet-service form? It seems Microsoft itself is considering seriously such a possibility. There’s a nugget buried deep in a November 27 (ever so-dully-titled “Life After Vista: Can Microsoft Retool for Web?”) Wall Street Journal story. Skip to the very end with the article and you’ll find this little gem: “Meanwhile, a cadre of respected Microsoft computer scientists and programmers formed a group under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to commence building software that could be a critical piece of what Windows may possibly become,Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, say people familiar with the work. That group,Office 2010 Serial, says a person familiar with all the issue, sees the future of Windows as much additional as an Internet service than software that runs on a PC.” Based on those couple of sentences, I’d say there’s some kind of a Microsoft incubated project in the works that may possibly or may very well not be under Microsoft Live Labs. And if Ozzie is involved, I’d bet we’re talking about significantly more than simply a hosted version of Windows available for “rent.” One thing’s for sure: Microsoft isn’t about to field a competitor to its desktop-Windows cash cow. (Windows client and Microsoft’s information worker units still generate 90 percent of the company’s profits.) But Microsoft is finding ways to extend its Windows and Office monopolies via ad-funded and/or paid subscription services,Office Home And Business 2010, like those it has fielded under the Windows Live and Office Live brands. Based on the hint in the Wall Street Journal, I’d say Ozzie and his gang are thinking about something bigger than simply another Windows Live or Office Live service. If you think further broadly about the “WebOS” concept – with WebOS defined as “a software platform that interacts with all the user through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local operating system” – it’s not far-fetched to believe that Microsoft may be building some kind of Windows- and Office-like front end that users could access from a Web browser. Perhaps it will take the form of an extension to the Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/e) technology that the company is developing. Or maybe it will look like a whole family of Windows Live and/or Office Live services bundled into a single, subscription-based service? Another possibility: Microsoft Research has been dabbling using the concept of making users’ desktop environments available via a portable flash drive,Office 2007 License, via a research project known as “Desktop on Your Keychain.” “Can we make desktop state available without also carrying the computer hardware?” (where desktop state equals user preferences plus user data plus applications) ask Microsoft Keychain researchers in a recent PowerPoint presentation. In Windows currently, it is difficult to separate user, application and machine-specific state, the researchers acknowledge. The proposed “Keychain” solution? The host machine runs virtual-machine monitor. The user runs in a virtual machine (like VirtualPC). The virtual disk is a “server in the sky.” A flash device acts as a persistent cache/log of a virtual disk, as well as storage for virtual-machine state. A machine’s local disk serves as a “lookaside” for virtual-disk content. Anyone else have any guesses about what Ozzie may be cooking up, in terms of making Windows available as a service?