Do you like robots?  How about the idea of robots?   Wish you had your own, but don't have time to build from scratch or a few thousand dollars to buy one?  Ever think it would be cool to control the Mars rover? 

If so, check out RoboChamps where you can develop and control robots without actually needing the robot.   Write real code to control simulated robots in simulated environments over the Internet!  There are even challenges to complete, and yes, you can program and control the Mars rover (at least, a simulated version).  The only way to have more robot fun would be if someone gave you one... and if you compete the in tournament someone just might! 

Why RoboChamps and whose behind it? 

Microsoft created RoboChamps to help people overcome some of the traditional challenges of learning to develop for (ok, play around with ) robots, and to help folks interested in robots discover the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio CTP1 that was recently released.   Excerpt from the RoboChamps overview page:

"While there has long been a large audience interested in robotics, there have also been a number of barriers to entry, both real and perceived. Robots are not widely available in traditional retail stores. If one could find a programmable robot, the cost was often times non-trivial. In addition, the ‘robot’ that could be purchased was often in the form of a kit and required hardware knowledge and skills. And if one could both find and afford a robot, there was a perception that programming one must be difficult.

"RoboChamps is a new robotics programming league that removes those barriers to entry and makes robotics available to a broad audience. RoboChamps is based in simulation, which removes the barriers to entry of availability, cost, and deep hardware knowledge."

The RoboChamps site has a community dimension (forums, blog, etc.), learning materials, a competition league, and you can get a Vista sidebar gadget to keep track of feeds and competition standings, as well as other "robot bling".   You can login with your Windows Live ID, and all the software needed to control your RoboChamps robot is free and downloadable via links on the RoboChamps site -- and it's the same software you would use to write code for real robots.  

Are you thinking, "Cool, but so what?"

Check out Mary Jo Foley's post, Why business users should grab a copy of Microsoft’s new robotics toolkit.  Would you have guessed that MySpace uses the current version of Microsoft's Robotics Studio toolkit to program across it's own distributed network?  In particular, they (and others) are interested in somethings called the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and Decentralized Software Services (DSS) for developing multi-core distributed systems.  CCR makes easier to handle IO asynchronously to smooth data flow and better manage computational resources.  Essentially, think "theory of constraints" on a micro scale. 

The DSS provides "a flexible foundation for defining applications as compositions of services interacting in a decentralized environment" (see here).  Among other things, DSSP helps you create applications that are contextually aware and can change behaviors based on events like changes in state within an environment -- even across many different sensor inputs.  For a conceptually simply example:

"If gas tank is less than half full, set transmission shifting pattern to 'fuel-saving' profile." 

Or, you might orchestrate a system to adapt it's behavior based on a composition of many services:

"If gas tank is less than half full, set transmission shifting pattern and engine control unit strategy to 'fuel-saving' profile unless there is a gas station along my route AND gas is less than $2/gallon AND the gas station is closer than my estimated "miles-until-fuel tank empty". 

These embedded automotive examples are a small-ish conceptual step from robots, but it's also possible to use DSS (as well as CCR) in many others kinds of systems -- including enterprise applications, modeling, scientific computing, etc. 

Finally, here's a little bit of what BillG has to say about Robots (more here) a few months back:

"The challenges facing the robotics industry are similar to those we tackled in computing three decades ago. Robotics companies have no standard operating software that could allow popular application programs to run in a variety of devices. The standardization of robotic processors and other hardware is limited, and very little of the programming code used in one machine can be applied to another. Whenever somebody wants to build a new robot, they usually have to start from square one…. Despite these difficulties, when I talk to people involved in robotics–from university researchers to entrepreneurs, hobbyists and high school students–the level of excitement and expectation reminds me so much of that time when Paul Allen and I looked at the convergence of new technologies and dreamed of the day when a computer would be on every desk and in every home."

Good luck with the Mars Rover! 

Jon Box has produced another interesting post -- this time on the Office Ribbon (aka the Fluent UI).  In particular, he points out a cool add-in from Office Labs that called "Search Commands" that will help you find your favorite commands in the new UI.  People are different, and like a lot of other things, how long it takes someone to adapt to the new UI can be plotted on a distribution.  If you happen to fall on the end of the distribution that takes a bit longer to adjust, you might find the Search Commands add-in that Jon talks about to be helpful.  I tried it myself some time back (before it was publicly available), and while I almost never actually used it, there were one or two times when it really helped. 

As a coincidence, the Office 2007 UI (aka the Fluent UI) came up at dinner last night with Josh Holmes and others.  (Yes, this is what Microsoft people talk about at dinner ).  One person said that it only took a very short time to get comfortable with the new UI.  Another person at our table claimed that it took them a month to get used to the new UI because they were a "power user".  That's an assertion I've heard before -- that power users take longer to adapt.  I think the rationale is that the more commands you use in the old version, the more commands you need to re-locate in the new version.  I think there's some truth to this in the aggregate, and yet it's not true to say that a power user will take a long time to gain equivalent proficiency with the new UI. 

Which brings us back to distributions.  For a refresher, here is a picture of a normal distribution (the red line) -- often called the bell curve.  This is not a histogram, but it's similar -- in a histogram, the x-access plots an observed value, and the y-axis plots the how many times that value is observed.  In the chart of the normal distribution, the red curve is a probability function that predicts the likely-hood of any observation.  The connection between the two is that for many phenomena in the natural and behavioral sciences, if you took an infinite sample and plotted the observations on a histogram the result would be the shape of a normal curve (thanks to the central limit theorem). 

And now (finally) coming back to the Fluent UI, there are many independent factors that determine where someone falls on distribution curve of how long it takes to gain an equivalent level of proficiency with the Fluent UI that they had in the last version of Office -- the degree of  "power user-ness" is just one.  It may be true that power users, as a group, tend to be toward one side of the normal curve (the side that takes longer to gain proficiency with the Fluent UI equivalent to what they had in Office 2003), but that does not mean that an individual power user definitely *will* take longer to adjust to the Fluent UI. 

For example, I would consider myself a power user of Office 2003 (especially Excel) and it took me less than 2 days to get comfortable with the Fluent UI in Office 2007.  In fact, I would say that within a week I could do significantly more significantly more quickly in Office 2007 vs. Office 2003.  So if degree of power user-ness is not the only driving factor, what else helps predict the adaptation rate?  I'm sure I don't have a complete list, but would hypothesize the following factors could help predict how fast a person adapts to the Fluent UI:

• The particular commands a person uses -- few people use more than 25% of Office capabilities, but there are thousands of capabilities and we all use different ones.  If you tend to use commands that are surfaced in the top two context layers of the Fluent UI -- as most people do -- then you will probably have an easier time adapting. If you often use commands that are more rarely used and got less prime real estate on the Fluent UI, then the adaptation process may tend to take a little longer (all other things being equal). 
• Innate orientation toward change -- some times change is easy, sometimes it is hard, and sometimes it is harder.  I don't have anything precise here, but I suspect some part of that equation comes down to us -- our personalities and strengths/weaknesses.  We all have strengths and weaknesses, but they're not all the same. 
• Attitude -- for someone who loves being the person in the department who knows how to do (formerly) complex things, and who takes pride in helping others tap into the Office "power features", the Fluent UI could be a bit of a blow.  Now, for example, pivot tables are easy for everyone.  I imagine the irritation around the Fluent UI for someone in this situation would only partly be that they now do pivot tables differently (after all, they invested the time to learn how to do it when it was much more difficult... now that it's become simple it surely is not beyond their capacity).  Rather, there may be a sense of loss in play as the power user's Office expertise becomes just a little less valuable when others can do more for themselves. 
• I'm sure there are others -- what would you add?

After all of this, the larger point is don't be afraid of the new UI -- even if you are a power user.  Think about where you are likely to fall on the distribution curve, and pick a good time to upgrade (e.g., not the night before a big PowerPoint presentation or an important Excel analysis is due).  In the end, most people find that before long they can do more, more easily in Office 2007 than in Office 2003 -- even many power users -- because in Office 2007 they are almost instantly capable of many features that were previously hidden deep in the Office 2003 menu structure. 

Where adaptation challenges are most significant, I suspect it's for folks who need the commands that are obscure in both the old and new versions of Office (but obscure in different ways).  If you think you might fall toward the longer side of the adaptation curve, or need commands that are obscure in both versions of Office, definitely go to Jon Box's post and grab the Search Commands add-in from Office Labs.   You may also want to check out the Office team's "Help and How-to" site, as well as the especially cool, Community Clips (also from Office Labs)! 

If you've not heard of Community Clips, the site describes itself like this:

If you've ever struggled with a feature in Office, if you want to increase your Office know-how, if you want to show others your favorite feature or trick, or if you've had trouble explaining to your friends how to do something, start using Community Clips today!

It's basically a video sharing site dedicated to sharing short screen-casts on how to do different things in Office. 

Stumbled on this recently, about how finance and marketing work together -- entertaining and thoughtful!  An excerpt: 

As an ex-finance guy who now works in marketing, I have been involved on both sides of this cycle for twenty years.

I have come up with a model, based on Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying, to help finance people better understand marketing people during the budget process. Think of it as the financial controller’s field guide for understanding marketing behavior. By using it, you can ask your marketing counterparts the right questions during the budgeting process using language they understand in a nonthreatening way to help reach closure around budgets. Just like the model in Dr. Kübler-Ross’s book, which I first read in high school a long time ago, not all of these stages occur in all marketing people, and they don’t always occur in order. But they all occur.

Stage One: Denial
"I am going to ignore your email asking me to justify the cost of the local golf tournaments we plan to sponsor next year. You obviously sent it by mistake, and if you didn’t then you just don’t get it. Maybe you’ll go away."

More here: The Five Stages of Death and Marketing - Deciphering Marketing Speak

From Miguel's de Icaza's web log:

Now that controls are part of Silverlight 2.0 and that most of the high-level controls have been open sourced and that they are incredibly powerful and great to skin it makes sense to think again about native desktop applications using Silverlight.

He also talks about some very cool stuff the Moonlight project is doing around standalone Silverlight apps for linux clients, as well as offers a few thoughts on what's needed to make cross-platform Silverlight desktop apps a reality. 

Thanks to Josh Holmes for the heads up. 

If you live in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio, or San Francisco, that is.  That's because today marks the debut of Microsoft  Surface in a production, retail environment.  AT&T is using Microsoft's revolutionary Surface tabletop computing device to help consumers compare cell phones. 

The NY Times has more on what AT&T is doing here.  I have more on Microsoft Surface here.  For me, what makes Microsoft Surface is really special is that it brings 4 things together in an elegant way:

1. Multi-touch computing  -- that is, the computer can receive and process multiple simultaneous inputs.  A traditional mouse driven human-machine interface handles only one input at a time: click here, and then click there. 
2. Machine vision -- a series of infrared cameras inside the table make sure that the computer knows what's happening on the surface.  This is used for object recognition -- items placed on the table are identified by dot patterns stuck on the objects that the cameras capture and the PC inside the table recognizes. 
3. The beautiful, immersive user interface.  Designed and implemented with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).  You may not have machine vision and multitouch on your PCs yet, but with WPF (write your own and/or use these controls) you can have beautiful, elegant applications that make your life easier and better. 
4. The table form factor. The fact Surface is basically just a Windows Vista PC with some fancy peripherals and special mutli-touch interface is significant -- it portends a future of intelligent objects that are simply part of our environment.  Perhaps somewhere Mark Weiser is smiling?  :-)

BTW, If you don't know about Mark  Weiser's work, he's often considered the father of ubiquitous computing and identified four principles for ubiquitous computing -- listed by Wikipedia as:

• The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
• The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
• The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
• Technology should create calm (where "calm technology" is "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention").

For those in the Healthcare and Life Sciences industries... Ben Flock sent me some info on what sounds like a fantastic -- and free-- event he's working on (below).  Sounds super interesting, and it's a great way to learn about what Microsoft is up to on a variety of strategic, technical, and solution-oriented topics in the Health and Life Science space.  And if Ben's involved, this is bound to be a top notch affair.  If you can be in Atlantic City, NJ, April 22-24th, definitely check this out!  More info here.

---------The invite is below----------------

Microsoft would like to invite you to the 2^nd annual Health & Life Sciences Industry Developer & Solutions Conference (Event Highlights & detailed Agenda below).  It’s going to be a great event including Peter Neupert (Microsoft’s Healthcare Strategy Leader), US & Worldwide industry representatives, a broad range of Microsoft Product/technology experts, and the Surface Computing team!  We’re expecting 400+ customer/partner attendees from the Payer, Provider, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, and Medical Device Industry…best of all, it’s a free event!  The event covers a broad range of subjects geared for development & architecture leaders along with executive technology and business decision makers.

Microsoft Health & Life Sciences

Developer and Solutions Conference 2008

Overview

This is a unique event designed for developers, architects, technical and business decision makers in the healthcare industry. Please join us to discover how Microsoft, its partners, and customers make possible the delivery of Software + Services in Health & Life Sciences.

Keynotes

Topic: Microsoft: Improving Health Around the World

Peter Neupert - Corporate Vice President Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corporation; Steve Aylward, Health & Life Sciences Industry General Manager, Microsoft Corporation

At the heart of the health information management dilemma is the fragmented nature of how health data is created, collected, shared and stored.  Few industries are as information-dependent and data-rich as health care and few are so siloed.  It is our philosophy that technology is a cornerstone of enabling a critical and sustainable shift in the way that healthcare is delivered and managed: aggregating data within and across provider organizations, aggregating data for consumers across all of their sources, and ultimately connecting these views for better-informed health decisions and better clinical outcomes.  A company with the reach and resources of Microsoft can play a major role in addressing these challenges and make long-term contributions towards improving the cost, quality and delivery of care.  This keynote session will help instantiate Microsoft’s overall vision for improving health, and its commitment to achieving transformation through industry-leading solutions.

Topic:  Microsoft Connected Industry Framework:  An enabler for meeting today’s demands and tomorrows expectations

Paul Mattes - Industry Managing Director, Health & Life Sciences,  Microsoft Corporation

Every vision and strategy must have a plan - a blueprint for execution from both a near-term and long-term perspective. In this session we discuss Microsoft’s Connected Industry Framework, providing specific context and solution strategy across the Health & Life Sciences Industry.  Our Premier Partner Sponsors will describe how they are leveraging the Framework in the delivery of Health & Life Sciences Industry solutions.

Topic: Microsoft Health Products:  Technology Roadmap & Customer Experiences

Grad Conn - Senior Director Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corporation

Amalga, Amalga HIS, Amalga RIS/PAC, and HealthVault.  Some of you may have heard about them, others may be scratching their heads in bewilderment. This is a great opportunity to gain business insight and technology perspectives on Amalga and HealthVault - Microsoft’s flagship Health Product brands.

Touch the Future with Microsoft Surface

You’ve heard of it..but NOW you can touch it. We will have a Microsoft Surface device available during the entire event – attendees will be able to view, interact, and see compelling demonstrations of how Microsoft Surface can be used.

Solutions Focused

· Health 2.0 – Health & Life Sciences version of web 2.0

· Connected Industry Framework (CIF) – “SOA enablement for Health & Life Sciences”

· Office Business Applications for Life Sciences  – “solutions for Life Sciences”

· Consumer Enablement Reference Architecture(CERA) – “empowering consumers in the new Healthcare age”

· Patient Safety Screening Tool (PSST) – “saving patient lives through proactive measures”

Deep Technical Content

Confirmed Technical Sessions include:

· Programming Microsoft Silverlight 2.0

· Building Secure ASP.NET AJAX Applications

· ASP.NET AJAX Design & Development Patterns

· SQL Server Data Services – scalable, easily programmable and highly available utility-based data store

· Building Enterprise Office Business Application Mashups

· Windows Presentation Foundation for Information and Data Visualization

· Managing the Application Lifecycle with Visual Studio Team System

· Presence and speech enabling your applications with Microsoft Unified Communications

· Architecting for High Performance and Multicore with Microsoft HPC and the .NET Parallel Framework

· Maximizing Data Value through Design of Charts and Visualization

Who Should Attend?

· Development and Architecture Leaders

· Executive Technology/Business Liaisons

· Technology Decision Makers

April 22-24, 2008

Sheraton Hotel

Atlantic City, NJ

Enabled by our Partners

03

Adam Kinney has a great write-up and preview on the most ambitious web media project ever attempted: NBC's site for the 2008 Olympics.  How big is this? 

For the first time, the web will be the first class channel for experiencing the Olympics.   And with almost twice the hours of coverage, access to broadcast content, interactive HD video, multiple simultaneous streams, social networking features, and more... the comparison is not even close.  TV, please take a seat in coach.  :-)

An excerpt from Adam's post:

PC World published a great article on the Olympics website last Friday which, before going into feature and technical details, begins with this:

How would you like to be handed this IT project: create a website that will present 2,200 hours of live, interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage. The site will have huge spikes of traffic, and operate under worldwide scrutiny, so it has to be designed for performance. It has to be done in the next 150 days; no schedule extensions are possible. And it  must deliver a brilliant user experience.

Adam also has a link to demo video shown at MIX.  See more here: NBC Olympics Silverlight - site preview review. 

And thanks to Jon Box for a heads up on this post! 

Like many other folks, I got an email today from Jim Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute.  Like all his emails, it's great, insightful reading.   I wanted to blog this one, and hoped to find a direct link on the www.lean.org site -- but no luck.  So i'm re-posting Jim's email below in its entirety.  (If anyone  knows how to find the text of his Jim's email online, please say where in the comments :-)  ). 

Dear John,

Every day humans eat very nearly the same number of meals and sleep in the same number of houses and travel the same number of miles to work. All of these numbers increase slowly with population growth, but the number of us on the planet and our needs don't change rapidly.

So how can we have dramatic short-term gyrations in an economy whose business is to supply what a relatively constant number of us need? I think of these gyrations as another form of mura, the term used by lean thinkers to describe short-term variations in demand not caused by a change in the long-term desires of the consumer. I call them the "big mura" in contrast to the "little mura" seen in most value streams every day when lagging information flows, big batches, and process instability cause "bull whip" effects all the way up each stream.

Years ago Dan Jones and I wrote in Lean Thinking that leaning the world's value streams to level demand from a pacemaker point and to produce goods in small batches with much less inventory would damp not only the little mura but the big mura as well. And there is some evidence that this has happened. The total amount of inventories needed to support a given amount of sales to end customers has been falling and the recession of 2001 was milder than many expected it to be. But we still have gyrations in the economy and as I write it appears that we are heading into another, beginning in North America.

Economists and policy makers have long accepted that these gyrations are human creations and that attempts should be made to level demand through fiscal policy, financial system regulation, and transparency -- other forms of heijunka. But until humankind gains more knowledge about how to do this – and more wisdom as well to damp the booms that soon become the busts – economic gyrations will continue and lean thinkers can't prevent them.

What we can do is to prevent the lean movement from being damaged by this recession. It is predictable that as the economy slides and companies get into deeper trouble, company executives and "lean" consultants will soon emerge with plans to get "lean and mean". Headcounts will be rapidly reduced as sales fall with the claim that value streams are being re-engineered to require less human effort. But what will actually be happening in most cases is that companies will simply be creating less value with proportionally fewer people. Then, when the recession is over and orders surge, they will rehire employees to behave just as they did previously. (Or they will convert former employees to contractors, with lower wages and fewer benefits.) There is nothing lean about any of this.

What we have always tried to do in the lean movement is to create more value for society while protecting the employees creating the value from short-term variations in demand. Unfortunately, in the present circumstance a few organizations will need to reduce their number of employees significantly simply to survive. And "some jobs" is always a better outcome than "no jobs". But their managers should call this what it is: a reduction in employment that permits them to do less with less. That is, less value creation with proportionally fewer employees in a slumping market. They should never call it "lean" because it isn't.

Most organizations will face a different choice in this recession. They can either treat their employees as an expense to be pruned quickly to protect earnings in the short term. Or they can treat their employees as an asset to be protected for their ability to create value in the long term. And lean managers will do the latter. They will view their employees -- with their accumulated knowledge of how to solve problems in order to continually reduce muda, mura, and muri -- as their organization's core advantage for success in the future even if there is cost to the organization in the short term.

I wish I could count on all managers to behave like lean managers. But I can't. Over the past twenty years many of us have worked very hard to introduce a new way of thinking about value creation and how to treat fairly the people creating the value. It would be a tragedy if the big mura of this moment discredits lean ideas and alienates employees from a way of thinking that can create a win-win-win for companies, employees, and customers in the long term.

I am therefore hoping that members of the lean community will speak out loudly whenever they see activities being labeled as lean that are only mean. And I would love to hear about positive examples of organizations with lean management that are taking the long view by finding ways to protect employees in the current downturn while laying the ground work for success in the next upturn. Indeed, these stories would make an excellent subject for a future e-letter.

With best wishes,

Jim

James Womack

Founder and Chairman

Lean Enterprise Institute

Update: Copyright 2008 Lean Enterprise Institute. Reprinted with permission.

To sign up to receive Jim's emails directly in the future, just register at the Lean Enterprise Institute.

In case you missed it, ISO has approved Open XML as a standard.  Brian Jones has more here.   What does this mean?  Well, among other things it means that the next version of Office ("Office 14" is the inspiring code name) will use an ISO standard as it's native file format.  And going forward, the evolution of the format will be managed through ISO.  Office file formats have not always been open, but have been a defacto standard for years.  Opening the file formats and making Open XML an official document format standard shifts control to Microsoft customers and the national standards bodies that make up ISO. 

Microsoft has long supported partners building on Office as a platform, and this continues to be true.  Hopefully, making the format specification open and independently managed will give customers and third party solution providers an even greater level of confidence and certainty when directly implementing the standard themselves -- for example by programmatically creating, reading, and manipulating Open XML documents. 

Similar in spirit, you might also be interested in Microsoft's "Open Specification Promise". 

On a personal note, as I travel around and meet with customers and partners, people often say things to me like "Microsoft has changed in the last few years -- you guys are more open, humbler, and better at listening to customers and partners."  I love hearing this, and hope that things like supporting ISO standardization for OXML, OSP, our collaboration with Novell/SuSE and Miguel de Icaza around Mono, the WS-* work, implementing part of the CLR on multiple platforms for Silverlight, etc, will help us keep moving in the right direction.  :-)

Timeless advice is always timely.  This, from David Olgivy by way of Branding Strategy Insider, is worth a few minutes.  

An excerpt:

• What you say is more important than how you say it.
• Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop.
• Give the facts. The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
• You cannot bore people into buying. We make advertisements that people want to read. You can't save souls in an empty church.
• Be well-mannered, but don't clown.

See the full list here: David Ogilvy Campaign Commandments: Branding Strategy Insider

Most of the debate around ISO standardization of Open Office XML file formats -- the native file format of Office 2007 -- is terribly acrimonious and FUD-filled.  For a different and interesting take on the debate, see here.  Why interesting?  The blog makes argues that the point of of ISO standardization is to actually take control of OXML away from Microsoft and place it in the public domain -- something important to society given how many people use Office. 

Rob seems to be under the impression that ISO-approval is some kind of quality badge of honor that you can proudly carry around. First of all, I think we can all agree that ODF itself is a clear example that ISO-approval not necessarily implies quality, interoperability and clearness. Secondly, how the specification was made is not the first priority when talking ISO-approval. The first priority should be:

We need to take control of OOXML out of the hands of Microsoft and back into society as a whole

This was imho the focal point of Patrick Durusau's support of DIS 29500 approval. Amongst other things he said that

Patrick Durusau: The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written (bold emphasis from original post).

Good article worth a few minutes here.  

Likes: The article focuses in on the competitive necessity and opportunity to leverage technology to create value in your business  It reads a bit like "IT Leadership 101", but sometimes what seems like common sense is not always common.  The article has strong tones of "business and IT alignment" -- a drum that continues to be worth beating.  And it highlights the importance of being able to make decisions the organization will be happy with.  Most importantly, the article should get people thinking about how tap "the hidden potential" of IT -- a good thing regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the authors' specific ideas. 

Dislikes:  In a way, the article is perhaps too focused on business-IT alignment -- the "wall that separates the IT group from the rest of the business" -- ignoring other issues like misalignment between possibly wise goals and inability to execute, and financial and accounting practices that lead "business" and "IT" to jointly make decisions without realizing the extent to which those decisions may be sub-optimal. 

In other ways, the article doesn't go far enough.  Computing is a bit like math -- it's integral to the success of every part of an organization.  You would never design an organization where all mathematics were performed by a special group, and you had to call them to come in whenever math needed to be performed.  Can you imagine?  "I got two numbers here, let me call the math guy to come in and tell me what they add up to".   Or, "I've got the list of customers we've reached, let me call the math guy to see if we hit our campaign goals."  Or, "We're running 58 Jobs per Hour on our manufacturing line, and our goal is 60 JPH... let me call the math guy to see if we need to speed up or slow down."  You get the idea: it's silly to think that people will not do math for themselves.  We expect a certain amount of numeric literacy in personnel across all functions of the business.  Increasingly, this will be true of computing as well. 

Today, much of computing (not all) is a liberal art, and the bar on basic computer literacy keeps going up.  I'm not suggesting abandoning IT as an organization and integrating all computing with various business functions, but I am suggesting that the level of integration should be flexible and that it will be expanding.  It's not terribly important whether this is executed as a shift of IT personnel into other functions or if it's other functions doing more for themselves.  The important things are the capabilities people are able to apply, one way or another.  There was a time when the slightest change in a report was a programming effort.  Then reporting tools came along that, once set up by IT, let business users create many of their own reports.  There was a time when email, Internet browsers, Instant Messaging were not allowed at work.  In many places, these tools have become indispensable. 

As we move into the future, I expect the integration of technology into how we work, as well as the integration of IT into other parts of the organization, to continue along at least three important dimensions:

1.  Expanding Productivity Environments.  Things that we used to believe were special purpose applications continue to become part of our "productivity environments" -- e.g., the ability to create and modify reports, exchange messages, share video conferencing, etc.  This trend is likely to continue to including things like easily bringing up and taking down analytical data marts, connecting to, creating, and modifying 3D visualizations, defining and executing complex business processes and workflows, etc.  Things that 2 years ago required an IT development project will soon be achievable in a rich way without direct IT involvement beyond providing the tools, data sources, and training.   

2.  Self-Service Application Development.  The trend toward "self-service" will also come to include development of applications.  A few years ago few people outside of IT had ever heard of a web service or RSS -- these were the province of IT folks close to the leading edge.  Today, web services and RSS are widely understood beyond IT -- at least at a conceptual level.  And increasingly, the conceptual level will be enough because tools designed for non-IT users will abstract much of the implementation details away from users.  Take a look at mashups -- including Popfly as a friendly environment to make and share mashups -- to see the direction things are going.   To the extent this is a tool-enabled phenomenon, it's actually a sub-set of #1 -- I've listed it separately here because IT organizations have traditionally made their own distinction between managing the productivity environment and developing applications... so be prepared for some internal IT tension around this trend.... 

3. The Rise of Corporate Philosophers.  Given the connotation of philosophers being people who don't do anything, this is probably the least flattering name I could have come up with, but I picked it for a reason.  Ontology is essentially the study of how things in the world are related to each other ("the nature of being"), and it's classic metaphysics.  We will continue to see increasing convergence in our physical and digital worlds, and that means being able to usefully represent more and more sophisticated ontologies.  Defining these ontologies requires a deep understanding of the nature of being within a domain -- the kind of understanding that requires practitioner experience.  Today this is often the realm of Information Architects within an IT organization, but moving forward the increasing complexity of ontologies will drive this capability closer to -- and probably inside of -- the various other business functions.  Using marketing as an example (but the same is true for other business functions), in today's terms we would call people emerging in this role some kind of hybrid -- part IT and part marketing .  Tomorrow, I think we'll just call them marketing people. 

As I said, good article worth a few minutes. 

How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential - WSJ.com

Wow -- so much at MIX I can't possibly do it justice right now, but check out the summary here.   Really, really amazing stuff and some super announcements.  Just a teaser:

• Silverlight for Mobile devices -- and not just windows mobile but Nokia Symbian, too. Use common skills for rich media apps everywhere.
• IE8 -- and true standards compliant browsing.  Especially check out Activities and Web Slices in the keynote
• Preview of the NBC Olympics site, based on Silverlight -- the most ambitious web media project ever. 
• Silverlight AOL email client -- showing off personalization and huge performance benefits of Silverlight over AJAX (conservatively, 2-3x in this case)
• Announcement of new WPF physics engine and controls coming soon
• A fantastic automotive B2C web site for Aston Martin -- with tie-ins to a UMPC WPF smart client guided selling in the dealership

See the video stream here. 

There's long been talk of the web as an emerging "platform" -- indeed it is.  Of course, that's an abstraction and a convenience. A valued convenience to be sure -- it helps us encapsulate a lot of details and communicate more effectively about an increasingly large number of things (what significant doesn't business  strategy -- whether operations or marketing -- doesn't have some web / Internet component to it?)….

Sometimes, however, I find it helpful to remind myself that the web as a "thing" exists only as a concept -- it's not physically instantiated as a monolithic thing but as a huge collection of independent things that together have properties of a different character than the individual components from which it's comprised.

In fact, that's a large part of the power of the web in the first place -- it's a great example of a complex, adaptive system. One that's growing all the time, thanks to the designers, developers, sys admins, and business folks who keep thinking up and experimenting with new value-creating opportunities for people to connect with each other (and increasingly to also connect with discrete, inert things).

I'm looking forward to meeting a bunch of these folks at MIX '08 out in Las Vegas this week, where Microsoft is unveiling some new capabilities to help these folks take the individual things that comprise the emerged web up another notch. If you're at MIX, too, reach out -- would love to connect. :-)

And if you were not one of the lucky ones who got a pass to MIX before it sold out, you can still follow the action at www.visitmix.com.  Keynotes get posted shortly after the live delivery, and all sessions are recorded and will be available for free online. Enjoy!

Historically, Microsoft's free development tool software program for students has been controlled by computer science departments.  This has probably been one of multiple reasons that comp sci students have disproportionately taken advantage of Microsoft's previous free software program for students.  Now, there's a new program, called DreamSpark, that seems like it will reduce the administrative burden for schools and students while also effectively extending the opportunity to get free development software to students in all types of college and university programs (something that was already allowed, but didn't get used as much as you might expect). 

If you've read my posts on computing as a liberal art, you can guess I think this is a great thing!  :-)

As a coincidence, I happen to sit right next to one of the guys on Microsoft's "academic team" who is intimate with this program.  We've chatted about it a couple of times over the course of the last few months, and one of the challenges he's mentioned to me revolves around the student verification process -- that is, how to verify who is a student eligible for the free software.  As with any ambitious program there may be some hiccups in the beginning -- especially around the student verification process since there's no real repository of "all students" -- but for most folks, the process should "just work".  Just in case, consider packing an extra helping of patience if you're planning to go get your software today.  :-) 

Also, you can see BillG talk about DreamSpark in this video here.