David Treadwell moves up the stack as Microsoft releases Live Framework to the developer community. With Mesh now clear as a fundamental glue and signaling layer within Azure services, Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Live Platform Services, tells TechCrunchIT that though Microsoft is focusing on developers at its Professional Developers event, the next big phase is to integrate the next version of Windows Live with Mesh infrastructure.
This is a classic old guard meets new guard moment, where Microsoft officials try and compartmentalize a massive disruptive wave along traditional group lines. As we hear from Office Enterprise’s Chris Bryant in another PDC video, the company is readying a technology preview of lightweight Office online applications.
http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?v=2&uri=channels/87522&embedId=49354514http://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf Watch as Bryant tiptoes through the minefield between the old Office jargon and the new talking points of the Azure direction: “We’re recognizing the company strategy of basically enabling connected productivity across the PC, the phone, and the browser. In order for customers to participate with each other in connected productivity scenarios, we have to reach out to the endpoints that they use on a regular basis.”
It’s the classic What Customers Are Asking Us For mantra. “We don’t look at it as feature parity between the Web applications and the desktop applications, because the scenarios that people will use the Web for are different scenarios. It isn’t about taking the entire feature set of Word and putting them on the Web.” The tension barely beneath the surface is between providing advanced features of Office on demand and the impact on Office’s revenue stream of a cannibalized Silverlight version.
Both officials say it’s very early, with Treadwell describing Mesh and Office integration as being in an experimental phase. But with the Office invite only preview coming later this year (it’s November, guys) and Mesh now opening up to third party developers through the Live Framework, reading between the lines has already started to be productive, especially if you’re on one of the one in four machines running Silverlight.
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