There has been some info on the web on a new version of Ad-funded MS Works that would basicall be free to the end user. Works has a stuff like a low end version of Word, address book etc. I have never used it as I have always had access to Office Professional.
Though most people in the US do not seem to like the idea, I think this is something that would be of great value in a country like India. I think something like Office Home funded by ads would be a great sucess in India or other countries where buying a license of Office is very expensive and there is a growing number of home users. For such non-technical users, like my parents, this would make a perfect way to use Office software legally. Most of these set of users currently use illegal copies of Office (most probably provided by their vendor or friends). I have rarely come across this user set using OpenOffice (I mostly find OpenOffice being used by techies rather than end customers) or other free tools. So it would make perfect sense for MS to have a Ad-funded version of home office for these customers. Though MS Works is not Office Home, I think this is a good first step and maybe it would lead to a ad-funded Office suite at sometime in the future.
I do get asked a lot of questions on what is the best technology to learn. Obviously, depending on what a person currently knows, this question also has options added. So it is usually, .NET or Java, VB or C#, SQL Server or Oracle etc..
And in most cases my answer depends on what I know of the person asking the question. Obviously, a generic answer is mostly useless. But then I do have some advice for you this year if you are a web application developer working on ASP.NET or related technologies.
Learn MOSS 2007.
2007 was a busy year for Microsoft. A new OS in Vista, a new Office platform in Office 2007 and lots of new versions of existing servers (BizTalk R2, SharePoint etc). Obviously the biggest marketing hype was around Vista and Office platforms. But personally, I think the most successful product (not from revenue, but rather the impact on enterprise IT) has been SharePoint or rather as it is currently called MOSS 2007.
I remember a discussion I had with a fellow architect around 6 months back, when I said, SharePoint will move from being a Portal server to a web application platform. Currently I see this happening a lot and in really big enterprises (I work mostly with Banks and Financial institutions and they are perhaps one of the biggest spender on IT). More and more enterprises are looking at SharePoint as a web application platform and making Enterprise IT decisions based on that.
So going forward, if you are a web application developer, you will have to also know MOSS, both from a configuration and developer perspective to work with really big enterprises that have made a decision to use MOSS as their web application platform.
I also see MOSS being increasingly adopted for its core competency of document management, content management etc. These adoptions are mostly in smaller and mid-sized businesses, where the low entry cost and rich out-of-box features make this the best way to make their doc mgmt and other task more streamlined.
The other thing that has helped MOSS is the integration that MS is doing in some of its other products. Eg. The MS BI stack (Performance Point Server), Visual Studio Team System etc. actually depend a lot on the SharePoint services and MOSS for their UI.
So whether you are looking at being a web application developer in a big enterprise, create doc mgmt applications in mid-sized companies or work on the MS BI stack, knowledge of MOSS is very important.
I don't see ASP.NET going away (obviously, custom development on MOSS uses the ASP.NET model), but will most probably the number of pure ASP.NET applications being developed may go down (in large enterprises). We also see more integration of MOSS concepts like webparts with ASP.NET and I assume more integration will happen going forward. As Personalization, per user customization requirements and Integration of enterprise wide search increase, MOSS becomes a more and more convincing story for enterprises, both medium and large.
With all the latest excitement on whether we would get a new version of Windows in a year or so, Supersite for Windows, has a few screenshots of what may end up as Windows 7.
Currently as mentioned in the page, it seems to be Vista with a few things added. It is still in design stage and it will take quite a while before they clear up on what new features will go in and what will go out.
But the problem with a new version coming out in a years time, is more to do with applications. For example, Lotus Notes just added support for Vista and they still do not support 64-bit (Personal Experience :( ). There are quite a lot of applications that need to start supporting stuff like 64-bit and UAC. With a possible new OS in a year or so, how many of these applications would be able to keep up??
