I also grabbed an interesting tidbit from another article about office apps hinting at MSFT’s domination of the category:

“Microsoft says Office Web Applications will be free to some 400 million Windows Live consumers, 90 million corporate Office customers with Software Assurance consumers and 510 million existing Office users via online hosting.” via http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/071409-microsoft-office.html?page=2

But how? The underlying data backend is Sharepoint for O2010 web, which is the best hook to get at it. But that’s just raw data (in proprietary web API too, i.e. no RSS/ATOM here). We all know Office is 51% about the features on the data.

In terms of actual features, i.e. changing behavior or hooking into how the O2010 web apps work there is *very* slim pickings when compare to the desktop offerings.

The Google connectors are an example of adding an interface add-in around the ‘traditional’ Office API, i.e. the desktop (it uses a combination of COM(!) and MAPI in Outlook FWIW). (There is an irony here in that Gmail is pretty much unextensible, while Outlook/Exchange are literally dripping with API’s for ISVs – i.e. Google is pretty much a ‘closed app’)

Those things were possible because Office is/was a desktop app. My point for your point above is that this really reenforces that O2010 Web has no extensibility story other than getting to the data – and that’s only be if you can get past the ‘Sharepoint Gatekeepers’ to enable access.

I think O2010 web is a missed opportunity for Microsoft. Very dissapointed with Ray Ozzie in terms of coordination of tech platforms/strategy. I’m a CTO of a public company (hence anon here) but if I’d let this amount of ‘tomorrow’s legacy code’ go ahead, knowing that it’s on the wrong platform, then I’d be fired.

How can you have a credible SL 3 story when you can’t even get your own internal teams to use it? i.e. my first reaction is that the productivitity ROI must be bullsh*it…

Using Mesh for communication/sync, I could see O2010 starting to look a little bit like Google Wave.

Not to mention the things 3rd party devs will tack on.

Example: Exchange Outlook Web Acess is one of the most complex and well used Ajax web apps ever built. Number of 3rd party improvements built on it = zero.

Forget things like greasemonkey too, you can’t run even a small business praying that a vendors magic numbers inside their Htm/scriptl won’t change.

Flash and AIR support H.264, so what’s the speed bump? what am i missing?

Pure speculation of course.

I just know they mentioned they would maintain both an Ajax version and a Silverlight version. I think that was talked about at Mix 09??

I believe Scott Gunthrie said somewhere that Silverlight 4 is going to be a larger update than Silverilght 3 is/was.

Silverlight 3 doesn’t even have print support yet so I can’t see Office being build on top of it.

My guess is they are going to add all features they need to Silvelight 4 to allow them to build “Silverlight” office.

Sounds good to me!

-Jeff Weber

I’m slightly confused by your coined “Silverlight Office” term. Doesn’t really make the story clearer.