Simon’s Blog

So, I’m sure you’ve seen the news. Microsoft has released details of its Live offering. Strangely, given what Live is all about, they have chosen to demo things via a (not very exciting!) web-site. But it’s actually a bit more interesting than that (if I’ve read them right).

Live is Microsoft’s push into “software as a service”. Unlike the AJAX crowd, however, my guess is that Microsoft won’t be limiting themselves to trying to build rich applications on top of a web browser. Rather, I suspect they will create on-line services that can be accessed by a broad variety of clients. That means the (Vista) desktop, regular desktop applications, mobile devices etc.

I think Microsoft could enable some pretty productive and interesting application development with this model. And I think it’s the right answer. If you want to do this kind of thing using non-Microsoft technologies, you can do all this stuff quite happily by using Java or C/C++.