I had the opportunity recently to speak at a Microsoft event on Web 2.0. It was an interesting evening, with speakers from several organizations discussing various issues and strategies that could be used to move the bar forward on the Web.
Now if you're a faithful reader, you've seen me rant every so often about the inadequacies of browser technology when it comes to delivering applications over the Internet. The advantages are well known - zero footprint, controlled install base, etc., but the disadvantages have been known to drive me crazy. Anyone who's ever hit the back button after kicking off some process and had it end up completely botched knows exactly what I'm talking about.
So the things that I saw at the conference really made me feel better about the future of human interaction with applications. Not just from a browser perspective either, although technologies such as Silverlight and Flex are some of the first real steps I've seen in creating technology that isn't least common denominator in terms of controls, presentation, and communications. Finally we won't have to see the screen refresh itself each time we select a state from some drop down box. I spent a little time examining the two packages from a usability perspective and found that both of them had great potential for creating real user interfaces in a browser. I still worry about the browser back button though. But a video Microsoft showed at the conference around the future of interface technology had me drooling - what you might see in a sci-fi movie may be coming our way sooner than we think.
But in conjunction with the discussion of technology for Web 2.0, we also started to discuss some of the other aspects of the Web. One in particular is the phenomenon of social networking. I work as a consultant, and social networking or social computing is a topic that many firms are trying to wrestle to the ground and make sense of.
Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, and LinkedIn are just a few of the consumer-based examples of the social community building that occurs via the Web. People come together, across the globe, drawn by some common interest and become part of a virtual community. The effects of this can be enormous - look at how one man working on an operating system changed how the world view's computers, just by making his work open source and freely distributing it. It's not just computers that benefit from this sense of community. Any product or service that can develop a fan base or following provides countless business opportunities. Sometimes it's about using the service to deliver a message, sometime the service is actually the product, but if you can get people together on a particular subject, you have a powerful vehicle.
And this leads me, finally, around to the subject of this month's focus - SOI, Virtualization, and Grid services. An inevitable consequence of successful social networking is expansion. Maybe you need more computing power to render that massive online game for an ever-growing horde of players, or you need more bandwidth for certain parts of your service to provide better streaming and more efficient content delivery.
Virtualization allows us to move capacity in ways that are directly meaningful to the business. Running on top of a Grid infrastructure, the entire corporate ecosystem, or at least major portions of it, can be controlled to provide optimized service and efficiency. Want to scale down power usage in the evenings when most users are offline? Simply have the grid control the number of available processors and shut down unneeded CPUs and disks. Need to have some capability available during backup periods and downtime? Use virtualization to slice yourself a minimal capability for users to be content with instead of forcing them offline for a period of time. The possibilities are staggering.