Things are changing fast down in the jungle of software solutions. Epiphanies and conversions are laying hold of the mightiest players and turning their plans to dust. Not even Microsoft is safe from the Angel of Upheaval.

All that is by way of saying, Web 2.0 ~ that innocuous green giant of our times ~ is on a roll, charging through the marbled halls of the movers and shakers. Microsoft is working on a Web-based, hosted Office suite.

For a while now, we’ve been handed down rumours of Google’s team-up with Sun Microsystems, who had this notion years ago and developed Java to implement it. A Google Office was to be announced a couple of weeks ago. All that happened was a damp squib of a deal to offer the Google toolbar with Sun’s Java download.

But the frisson awoke the Kraken of Redmond, Wash. Office is one of its cash cows, along with Windows and servers. It couldn’t simply stand by and watch the Mountain View upstart lead its ruminant herd out of their fields into its own more rarified environment.

When startup becomes upstart you know it’s winning the argument. So does Microsoft. In recent weeks, Ballmer (CEO) has used F-words to describe what Microsoft will do to Google. Bill Gates has made a series of speeches ~ this week to the BBC ~ promising that Google will be all but trounced. It’s heady stuff, and Gates has even more competition on different fronts from Yahoo and a cloud of newer, fleet-of-foot entrants.

The very notion of the “rich client” (desktop applications) is apparently coming under review at Redmond. Software-as-service is the new buzzword. Top man Ray Ozzie, no less, is leading the charge.

Trying to lessen the juddering change of tack, Bill Gates says, “You can say we’ve been in the hosting business forever. Hotmail, you know, the world’s biggest email system, is hosted by us.” But a company insider has said, Microsoft will have to adapt and would “do so by brute force”, hoping that it would figure out a more elegant way in time.

Industry analysts are likening the move to Web 2.0 hosting to the “turn on a dime” shift that Microsoft made in the 1990s when it “discovered” the Internet. But there’s no more zealous enthusiast than the recently converted. According to Information Week, “When asked which other products and services Microsoft would host, another Microsoft insider said, ‘Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.’”

We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of the world’s biggest software producer adopting the manners and protocols of Web 2.0 with its rather hippyish social values. It’s a bit like Attila the Hun invading the effete and blinkered society of late-Empire Rome. The Eternal city proved to be just a passing phase.

Talk of “brute force” from the Microsoft camp indicates that the gloves are off. The modern Visigoths are on the move. Will history repeat itself? Or will ~ this time ~ the vastness of the Web and its near-infinite expansibility, simply swallow up the invader and demonstrate its vulnerability too?
[Also via ZDNet]