November 10th, 2009

Microsoft whittles away at Oslo; now plans to fold it into SQL Server

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:23 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Windows server

Tags: Oslo, Microsoft SQL Server, Server, Microsoft Corp., Databases, Research & Development, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Business Operations

There are few initiatives at Microsoft that have undergone as many twists and turns as Oslo, Microsoft’s modeling platform/strategy.

On November 10, Microsoft announced the latest Oslo shift: Oslo’s three main remaining components are going to be be renamed “SQL Server Modeling” and be folded into some future release of Microsoft’s database.

In 2007, Microsoft first discussed publicly its plans for “Oslo” — an amorphous multiproduct effort that encompased future releases of .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server. By the fall of 2008, Microsoft had decoupled .Net, VIsual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server from Oslo. When officials said Oslo, they meant Microsoft’s evolving modeling strategy and technologies, specifically the M language, the Quadrant tool and the metadata repository. This past summer, as part of one of Microsoft’s countless reorgs, the Oslo team was combined with Microsoft’s Data Programmability team (which manages Astoria, Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity Framework (EF), XML, ADO.Net and tools/designers).

Going into the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 next week, Microsoft is planning to make available a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Oslo, which will be its first since May 2009. This new CTP will be known as the SQL Server Modeling CTP.

According to a November 10 blog posting by Product Unit Manager Doug Purdy, this new CTP “will begin to demonstrate how developers will use these (Oslo) technologies in concert with things like T-SQL, ADO.NET, ASP.NET and other parts of the .NET Framework to build database applications.”

“All of these components are now part of SQL Server and will ship with a future release of that product,” Purdy blogged this week. (Purdy doesn’t specify a ship date target, but I’m doubtful it will be in time for the next version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 R2, which is due out in the first half of 2010.)

As of next week, Microsoft also plans to integrate the Oslo” Developer Center and the Data Developer Center into a new site, http://msdn.microsoft.com/data.

On Twitter, the overwhelming sentiment about the latest change in Oslo’s direction are largely negative. Here are a few reactions:

Scott Banwart: With this announcement, I no longer see the point of Oslo.

Tomas Restrepo: Cynical thought of the day: Oslo == Longhorn. OK, could’ve been worse (i.e. Cairo).

James Hart: Any expectations anybody had for what Oslo might turn out to be came from their own imagination. Disappointment was inevitable.

Ryan Rinaldi: The Oslo story just got more confusing.

Steve Bohlen: good lord; Oslo follows in the footsteps of WinFS; big (if nebulous) idea degenerates into dull implementation w dubious value

Sean Munger: Friends dumbstruck at flying saucers descending over Oslo. (Oops. Maybe a different Oslo)

Any developers out there see a silver lining in the latest Oslo moves? Or is it time for the aliens to rush in and take over?

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft 'Geneva' identity wares approach the finish line

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:35 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, Security, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: Geneva, Microsoft Corp., Research & Development, .Net, Microsoft Windows, Application Servers, Development Tools, Middleware, Business Operations, Software Development

Microsoft is making available for download the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of its “Geneva” framework, the technology officially known as Windows Identity Foundation.

(For all you Microsoft codename trackers out there, “Geneva” is the next version of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). The programming framework supporting the next version of ADFS originally was codenamed “Zermatt,” then, later, also took on the “Geneva” codename. Microsoft’s Windows Cardspace is the third component of what Microsoft calls “Geneva.”)

On November 6, Microsoft released the RC bits of the framework, which are designed to provide developers with a new programming model and software development kit for creating identity-aware .Net applications. According to a blog post on the Forefront Team Blog, Windows Identity Foundation “provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) applications.

Geneva and the Geneva framework also are related to Microsoft’s Azure environment, as the next version of ADFS is part of the Azure Services layer in Microsoft’s cloud. (Microsoft’s current Azure diagrams don’t show ADFS as part of Azure, but I hear any new ones we see at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November will include it.) The goal of Geneva is to provide developers and users with a single, secure sign-in capability across both cloud-based and on-premise applications.

In other PDC-related news, Microsoft is planning to distribute a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Oslo modeling platform. This will be the first CTP that team has provided since May and it will require Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 Beta 2 to work. It’s due out on November 17. (Thanks to MVP Doug Finke for unearthing the Oslo link.)

February 2nd, 2009

Microsoft delivers tool updates for Oslo, Live Framework

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:21 pm

Categories: Development tools, Live Mesh, Oslo

Tags: Software, Oslo, SDK, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Modeling, Research & Development, Productivity, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft posted for download late last week new test builds of its Oslo software development kit (SDK) and its Live Framework tools.

The updated Oslo SDK test build is an update to the first Oslo SDK Community Technology Preview (CTP), which Microsoft issued in October. From the release notes, it looks like the January Oslo SDK build includes relatively minor updates around “test coverage, improving test quality, and resolving code defects.”

The Oslo SDK includes the Microsoft M modeling language, documentation and samples of Oslo models written in M and the “Intellipad” tool for Oslo. Oslo is Microsoft’s modeling platform.

Meanwhile, on the services side of the house, on January 30, Microsoft rolled out a new CTP of its Live Framework tools. The Live Framework Tools work with Visual Studio and are aimed at developers who want to build and upload Live-Mesh-enabled Web applications in the Live Desktop. The January CTP of the Live Framework tools is primarily a set of bug fixes.

December 17th, 2008

Microsoft Big Brains: Anders Hejlsberg

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:08 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Oslo, PDC 2008, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Programming, C#, .Net, Programming Languages, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

I’ve launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Anders Hejlsberg
Claim to Fame: The inventor of the C# programming language (”and the steward of it for about ten years now”)
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 12 years
More About You: Before joining Microsoft, was one of the original employees of Borland, where he authored Turbo Pascal. (He also was the chief architect of its successor, Delphi.)  At Microsoft, was key in helping create the .Net Framework, Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “It’s been satisfying to be at the right place at the right time to create an important part of our development infrastructure.”
Team(s) You Also Work With: Still working daily with the C# and .Net teams, as well as various groups within the Connected Systems Division (which is “building a whole infrastructure on top of .Net”), SQL Server and Microsoft Research.
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I love working with smart people and being challenged. I also like working on stuff that’s relevant. That’s my adrenaline shot.”

Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg is a guy who likes to see his projects through.

Currently, Hejlsberg is very focused at the moment on the next version of C#, known as C# 4.0. He is still the Chief Architect in charge of the product.

Microsoft shared a first tech preview build of C# 4.0 in late October. On the C# 4.0 new features list: Dynamic look-up; better COM interoperability; and more. And because language taxonomies are dying out, Hejlsberg said it’s not strange that C# 4.0 will borrow from and be heavily influenced by  dynamic languages. (C# 3.0 was more influenced by functional programming languages.)

His C# focus aside, Hejlsberg also is thinking ahead about bigger programming trends and technologies beyond his beloved C#. One of these is the concept of “metaprogramming.”

“Metaprograms are programs that manipulate themselves or other programs as data,” Hejlsberg explained. “They automate the act of programming and are closely aligned with DSLs (Domain-Specific Languages). Code generation is the poor man’s term for this, but it really doesn’t do it justice.”

Read the rest of this entry »

November 3rd, 2008

Microsoft Big Brains: Brad Lovering

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:02 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Development tools, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, Microsoft Big Brains, Oslo, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley, Team, Oslo, Modeling, Brad Lovering, Team Management, Research & Development, Management, Business Operations

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

I’ve launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Brad Lovering
Claim to Fame: As of two months ago, runs the entire Oslo team in the Connected System Division, and plans to do so through RTM of Version 1 in 2009.
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 20 years
More About You: Straight out of college at the University of Washington, came to Microsoft and worked on a succession of developer-focused products, ranging from Visual Basic, to Visual J++, to Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework, to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). For the past four years, been focused on Oslo tools and strategy
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “I’ve been able to ship every product I’ve worked on.”
Team(s) You Also Work With: Azure cloud team, System Center unit, Team Foundation System, Visio, Dynamics CRM/ERP units
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I’ve been at Microsoft half my life. I have my family and I have software. I love making software. I want to do this another 20+ years, if I can.”

Every three to four years during his 20-year career at Microsoft, Technical Fellow Brad Lovering has had a fireside chat with Chairman Bill  Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer and Senior Vice President/Chief Technology Officer David Vaskevitch.

“It’s a balance. I say what I’m interested in. They talk about getting the right teams and assembling the right pieces,” Lovering says.  And then Lovering goes off and works on whatever developer-focused project that he’s interested in and needs him most.

It was four years ago when Lovering initially took on the assignment of working with Microsoft’s then-fledgling Oslo  modeling tools and strategy team.

“The first year was a lot of customer stuff. Then it was a year of getting the team in place. There were various incubations in various places,” he reminisces. “It will be five years total by the time (Version 1) ships” as part of Visual Studio 2010.

It’s somewhat atypical for Lovering to be managing a team of a couple hundred people, as he is doing now.

“I spend most of my time on tech design,”  he says. “Half my job is typically talking to internal (Microsoft) partners. Now (with Oslo), we’re also starting to talk to external partners” he says.

“I’m staying with the Oslo team through RTM and hopefully for another turn for Version 2. I’m excited to do a Version 2 for the first time,” says the typically on-to-the-next-thing Lovering.

What’s left to do after the first set of Oslo deliverables  (a shared repository, the M modeling language and the Quadrant visual-modeling tool) are completed? Lovering says there is a never-ending laundry list, especially around the cloud. Already, the Oslo team has started working with the Azure (Red Dog) cloud OS team to build a domain-specific language (DSL) using Oslo.

“You need a model-driven approach for these big systems,” like Azure, Lovering says

There are potential synergies between Oslo and the System Center systems-management tools and technologies, the Dublin application server team, the Dynamics CRM and ERP wares, too, he says. Almost every big software-development project at Microsoft could benefit from Oslo, Lovering says. Meanwhile, don’t be surprised to see many next-gen Microsoft tools and products include Oslo integration as a feature. Visio, for example, could benefit from tighter import/export integration with Quadrant, Lovering says.

“I spend so much of Microsoft’s money doing crazy stuff,” Lovering concludes. “But they keep saying, ‘go,go, go.’”

So off goes Mr. Oslo to help build out more domains and find ways to get developers on board with Microsoft’s modeling technologies.

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

October 24th, 2008

Next week: All PDC, all the time

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:50 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2008, Research, Robotics, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Live, Windows client

Tags: Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Corp., Strategy, Management, Microsoft Windows, Podcasts, Operating Systems, Software, Internet

How many times in the past year have I asked about a product, a service or a strategy to be told by Microsoft officials: “Just wait till the PDC. We’ll explain all”?

Finally, that promised “tell-all” date is here. Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) kicks off next week.

As I’ve been posting over the past few months, the PDC is where Microsoft is expected to offer sneak peeks and updates on a variety of its platform technologies. (Check out my aggregated pre-PDC coverage to date.)

Attendees will get a demo of Windows 7 by Windows engineering chief Steven Sinofsky, as well as pre-beta M3 bits to take home. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is on tap to outline Microsoft’s Live Framework, the Live Mesh development platform. Windows Server head Bob Muglia is expected to unveil Microsoft’s cloud development platform and explain how Microsoft plans to try to one-up Amazon and Google in this space — via a combination of its Windows Cloud OS, virtualization and a variety of cloud-optimized services. There are sessions on Microsoft’s Oslo modeling strategy and platform, Silverlight 2 for mobile, parallel/concurrent computing and more.

To get a jump on things, you can check out Microbite, a new podcast series I’m doing with The Register’s Gavin Clarke. Episode 1 of Microbite, our PDC Preview, is available for your listening pleasure.

Meanwhile, starting on Monday, I’ll be part of a live-blogging crew with a number of other Microsoft watchers, including my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott, LiveSide’s Kip Kniskern, Within Windows’ Rafael Rivera, Windows Supersite’s Paul Thurrott, Neowin’s Tom Warren and Istartedsomething’s Long Zheng. We’ll be doing a combined live group blog of all of the PDC keynotes. Come back to my site on Monday October 27 at 8:30 a.m. PT to check out the live blog of Microsoft’s cloud launch – a keynote by Softies Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson.

October 20th, 2008

Microsoft Big Brains: Brian Harry

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:28 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Oslo, PDC 2008, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Corp., Team Management, Management, CLR, .Net, Research & Development, Middleware, Microsoft Windows, Software Development

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

I’m launching this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Brian Harry
Claim to Fame: Product Unit Manager running a 120-strong unit focused on Team Foundation Server
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 14 years (since Microsoft bought his version-control-tool company One Tree Software)
More About You: Before joining Microsoft, worked on e-mail development at DaVinci Systems. Once Microsoft bought One Tree, worked on Microsoft SourceSafe and then Microsoft Repository. Wasthe Development Manager for the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and then Product Unit Manager for several years. Is based in North Carolina
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Played a major role in getting the .Net Framework effort started
Team(s) You Also Work With: Developer Division, Server and Tools, Office, Windows
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I can work on pretty much whatever I want. I can pick a problem I am passionate about and get hundreds or thousands to marshall around that. It’s an adrenailne rush to do that.”

Microsoft is pushing hard to get into the application lifecycle (ALM) management space, as anyone who’s been trying to keep up with all the recent news around Microsoft’s “Oslo” modeling products and strategy is well aware.

But ALM isn’t just about modeling. In its broadest sense, it’s about collaboration, that buzzword darling of the Web 2.0 set.

“My whole career has been about developers and/or some kind of collaboration product for developers,” says Harry. “Now I get to work on a collaboration product for developers.”

Harry’s guiding principle is he works on products for which he would be a potential customer, he says. That’s why he has focused on technologies like ALM and .Net/CLR during his Microsoft tenure.

Speaking of the .Net and the CLR, there is still plenty of work to be done, Harry says.

“One problem the CLR has faced is deployment. Silverlight is obviously a big asset here, but deployment and Visual Basic integration are quite still a challenge,” Harry admits. “.Net has been wildly successful in the server space, but has been less so in the client one.”

“We still live in a dual world: CLR developers and unmanaged developers,” Harry continues. “We need to bridge the gap and to have one programming model. Right now, the (Microsoft) Developer Division still has to target two different programming models. The proof point will be when Windows and Office embrace .Net as a first-class model for their applications. Windows APIs (application programming interfaces) need to come out as .Net Framework classes.”

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

October 10th, 2008

Microsoft renames its 'D' language 'M'

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:28 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2008, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Microsoft Visual Studio, Oslo, Microsoft Corp., Modeling, Research & Development, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to slowly trickle out details about its Oslo modeling strategy. The latest info with the Connected Systems Division (CSD) has gone public are the names of the three Oslo components it will release in Community Technology Preview (CTP) form at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

Oslo — which Microsoft initially outlined as encompassing everything from Visual Studio 2010, to System Center Version 5 — now is comprised of just three elements, according to the Softies:

• The modeling language, known until fairly recently as “D” (seemingly for “declarative”), which is now known as “M.” M will let developers express models in text.
• The visual modeling tool, known as Quadrant, for more complicated modeling tasks
• A shared repository, based on SQL Server, for storing models, schema and metadata. Developers can use Access, Excel, report writers and/or analytics tools to aceess and manipulate the information in the  repository.

Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President of CSD, said Microsoft intends to deliver the final version of all three of these components as part of a future release of Visual Studio. (He didn’t specify whether it would be Visual Studio 2010 or not).

While Microsoft expects most of it users to edit their models in Visual Studio, the company also will  offer a standalone editor (Intellipad) as an option.

Models are no longer just about describing applications; they are part of the applications, Wahbe said during a press tour this week.

“Every large existing application already has a model. Today, it’s hard to author the models and it’s hard to integrate the models. That is where Oslo comes in,” Wahbe said.

October 7th, 2008

Microsoft PDC: Will the real cloud platform please stand up?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:05 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Live Mesh, Mix '08, Oslo, PDC 2008, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Tags: Platform, Zurich, Microsoft Corp., Mesh Platform, Research & Development, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

At the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, “platform” will be the watchword of the day. I’m going to be interested to see which cloud platform of the many that Microsoft is expected to unveil will get top billing.

It’s no secret that the Softies are going to highlight the Live Mesh platform at the late October confab. At its Mix conference in April, Microsoft took the wraps off the Live Mesh “user experiences” and focused on the device synchronization and collaboration capabilities of Mesh. Microsoft developers did discuss at a high level the Mesh developer platform at that time, as well, but only at a high level. At the PDC, the Mesh platform is going to get the royal (beta) rollout treatment.

The Mesh platform consists of several different layers. At the lowest level, there are programming interfaces and frameworks that will allow developers to write software and services that bridge the software/services development divide. On top of those frameworks will be a set of infrastructure services, like storage, identity/security, pub/sub, communications and remote device management.

Microsoft is expected to emphasize the ability of the Mesh platform to help developers push their applications to users on multiple devices. The goal? To make applications and services more easily findable, installable and shareable virally.

Live Mesh may be Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet project, but it isn’t the only platform that the Softies will be touting at the conference. Red Dog, a k a Microsoft’s “cloud OS” is another. From what I’ve heard, Red Dog is going to be a set of operating- system-level components that comprise the foundation of Microsoft’s hosted platform for developers. Think of it as Microsoft’s equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Then there’s the elusive “Zurich,” which Microsoft continues to refuse to acknowledge, even though — at one point — the company acknowledged publicly on its own Web site that Zurich was “extending Microsoft’s .NET application development technologies to the Internet ‘cloud.’” I’ve heard from some folks that Zurich is Microsoft’s uber-services platform, something like Amazon Web Services (of which EC2 is a part). If the Amazon analogy holds, Red Dog, SQL Services Development Services (SSDS) , BizTalk Services and other existing and forthcoming cloud-related technologies might all be part of Zurich.

Is the Mesh platform a subset of Zurich? Is Red Dog part of the Mesh platform?

Read the rest of this entry »

October 1st, 2008

A new mystery: What's Microsoft got up its Office Live sleeve?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Live Mesh, Office Live, Office Live Workspace, Oslo, PDC 2008, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0, Windows 7, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client

Tags: Mary Jo Foley

It sounds like Microsoft has yet another Professional Developers Conference (PDC) announcement percolating — beyond the Windows 7, Oslo, cloud OS (Red Dog/Zurich) and Mesh Platform stuff about which the company already has been dropping hints.

Specifically, as my ZDNet blogging colleague Zack Whittaker notes, it seems as if some sort of new Office Live unveiling is in the cards, too. Whittaker had a chance to ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during Student Technology in London on October 1 what is up next for Office Live. And Ballmer sure made it sound as if Microsoft’s got something more coming beyond the Office Live Workspace service that it already is beta testing.

I’m inclined to think Ballmer is hinting that Microsoft has more up its sleeve than just the announcement of the final release of Office Live Workspace. But I’m still doubtful that the Softies are ready to go whole hog and deliver a fully Web-based version of Office.

So what else might be coming? I’ve got some pure guesses:

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Other thoughts as to what Microsoft might do in the next few weeks in the Office/Office Live arena?