From the lack of interest I'm seeing in my feed list, I would have to assume I'm not the only one less than enthused about Microsoft's Azure. About the only person I know who has perked up and displayed real interest is Nicholas Carr, and some of his interest is most likely because he wrote a book on cloud computing.

That Azure is a competitive strike at Amazon is a given. What's missing in Ozzie's statement, though, is the fact that Amazon originally rolled out it's cloud computing services as a way of maximizing under-utilized server farms during the company's quiet times. I don't know if this has changed, and Amazon is now farming clouds deliberately, but I hope not—the original idea was quite sound.

I am not surprised that Ray Ozzie would urge Microsoft into the clouds considering his background, first with Lotus, and then with Groove. Groove, especially, was cloud-based. Probably one of the more sophisticated cloud-based applications at the turn of the century.

But as far as I know, Groove never did catch on in any big way. I imagine when Ozzie was hired at Microsoft and Groove folded into the Microsoft family, the expertise this acquisition brought into the company played a big part in the implementation of Azure, but it still doesn't compensate for the fact that Groove never caught on. Not in corporate America, which is Microsoft's bread and butter.

Amazon can probably make do providing data storage and services for the startups, which seems to be its primary customer. I can't see Microsoft doing the same, not the least of which, startup and Microsoft are not words that necessarily go together well. Microsoft has always been a corporate company, pricing its products accordingly, and in doing so, giving both Apple and Open Source room to breathe and expand. Apple sold to the artists and mavericks. (Can I use maverick still, or has that term been trademarked by the Republican Party?) Open source managed to capture all the folks who fell in-between, though when Apple released Mac OS X, there was some platform straddling.

Seriously, I have to ask: can you imagine Citigroup or Bank of America farming any of its applications out to the Azure platform? How about Chrysler, or Blue Cross? Oh, there might be some IT in these big companies that will want to experiment around, but I've not met a big company yet that didn't want to control every last aspect of its data. Several industry types can't do something like cloud computing for most of their data—they would be prohibited by laws built to safeguard private information.

So, Azure isn't a move to entice the corporates to the cloud (can't be, really can't be). It's seemingly a move to entice the smaller guy, something that Microsoft has not shown itself to be particularly adept at. For one thing, the Visual Studio 2008 application that developers can use to build to Azure is pricey. Microsoft still hasn't learned that rule number one is you don't charge the developers money to access the development tools, if you want the developers to drive business to your platform.

Oh sure, Microsoft puts out a baby version of its different developer applications, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts, the baby version won't interface with Azure. And SOAP? Seriously, who does SOAP anymore? I thought the whole SOAP/REST thing was decided, a long time ago. We are talking 2009, not 1999.

I must admit to being a skeptic of all the recent cloud fooflah, not the least of which we've all seen what happens when a cloud server like Amazon has problems, resulting in several different startups being without service for several hours. I can respect that cloud computing allows startups to get a leg up, but I have to wonder: is that enough for a long-term sustainable business? Is there really enough business for another player in the game?

Once I made the decision to quit writing for a living (there was a living involved?) and return to consulting and development, I looked around at all of the existing technologies and asked myself what I should spend time on, in order to sharpen my development skills. Perhaps I'm a relic of times past (yeah, all of five years, ancient times), but I decided to spend most of my time working with Drupal and one or two other CMS, REST, a little RDFa, a touch of SVG and other programmable graphics tools, and maybe a smidgen of this or that, whatever strikes my fancy, and that includes AIR and OpenLaszlo and some of the other web/desktop platforms. You can never go wrong becoming as proficient as possible with CSS, the markups, the data sources (SQL/RDF/XML/JSON), PHP (or Python or Perl, maybe Ruby, always C++), JavaScript, and REST.

One could say that what I described is all that's necessary for cloud computing, but there's a whole new game when you have to create pie slices of your applications and throw them into a black box. It takes no additional time to learn to do cloud computing, true. However, it takes additional time to learn to do cloud computing well. I'm not taking that time, for any cloud. Not Amazon's. Not Google's. Not Safesforce.com (Salesforce.com?) Certainly not Azure.

If I'm wrong in my assessment, I'll watch the rest of you fly past me, like birds on the wind. If I'm right, though, and today's cloud is the same as yesterday's Web 2.0—more hype than reality—I'll already be well grounded when this bubble pops.

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O'Reilly Radar has a post with graphics related to the recent study of people using older, insecure browsers. At a glance we can easily see that most of the problem occurs with Internet Explorer, most likely IE6.

If Wikipedia is correct, IE6 was released on August 27, 2001. Come this August 27th that makes this browser seven years old, far older than most software supported by most organizations.

If we apply the same longevity to other software that's been applied to IE6, all those who are using IE6 must still be using Windows 2000, the first release of the Mac OS X, Photoshop 3.x, a dial-up modem, AOL for chat, Yahoo for search, most of your applications are on the desktop, most of your backend processes are on a Sun or IBM mainframe, probably in Java, and probably using the JRE 1.3 or so. If you're using a database, it's most likely Oracle 7.x or SQL Server 2000. If you're developing for the web, you're most likely still using Perl and CGI, if not Java, or ASP. You might be using some Python or PHP, definitely no Ruby or Rails. If you are developing using Visual Studio, it's Visual Studio 6, and you're still not ready for .NET

You do your social networking through Usenet or AOL, Epinions, The Wall, or some other online BBS or forum. You can write over 140 characters. When you publish to the web, you're hand editing your web pages, or using a freebie HTML editor, Macromedia's DreamWeaver, Vignette, or some other larger commercial product. You might be using Blogger, though it's doubtful. You might be using a syndication tool, though it's doubtful. In fact, it's doubtful that you would be reading this.

At one time, IE6 was the best there was, but that was a long time ago. We've used it when it was shiny and new, and it brought us innovation and delight. We used it through its usefulness, when it became more anchor than step. We've used it until we now curse its name. We continue to use it because no one seems to be willing to say, "It's over".

We should celebrate what Internet Explorer 6 brought us at one time, by letting it go. I think that August 27, 2008 would make a fine EOL date for this once great browser.

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Browsers have been generating a lot of buzz this week.

Opera just released Opera 9.5, which I've already downloaded and installed on all of my machines. I'm also going to be downloading and trying out the new Dragonfly JavaScript debugger, since I'll be covering it (and other JS tools) in the second edition of Learning JavaScript.

Now, it would seem that next Tuesday is the official Firefox 3 download day. Of course, if you even use Firefox on that day you'll be downloading the released version on that day.

I'm particularly happy about Firefox 3, as I've had some SVG rendering issues related to Firefox 2 that made me hesitate in using SVG more completely in my various web sites. Now, I can go to town.

The IE team also released a new post about IE8 beta 2, out in August. Unfortunately, the news about IE8 isn't as positive as the news about Opera and Firefox. What's happened is that the initial use of a meta element in order to trigger "IE7" mode, has been proven to be problematical, and needing to be further refined. Now, developers are encouraged to use the EmulateIE7 mode, in order to emulate IE7 behavior, rather than enforce IE7 standards. This is going to be causing confusion, and doesn't necessarily lead to a sense of warm and coziness that the IE team has their act together.

Unfortunately, no word on support for opacity. The IE team removed the MS proprietary opacity filter in IE8, which was good. However, the team did not put in place the standards-based opacity, which is causing a great deal of unhappiness.

I decided to check the browser statistics on my own sites, particularly my new ones, and my older Burningbird, which I've been cleaning up in Google. What I found is the following:

Only 10.5% of visitors to my new Just Shelley site use MSIE. Of the remaining, Safari users account for 8.9%, Opera users 4.4%, and Firefox users account for a whopping 65.1% of the user base.

At RealTech, MSIE 5.5 users account for 6.7%, 6.0 users 5.4%, and 7.0 users account for 4.6%. IE8 beta testers only account for 0.5% of the users. For the rest, Safari has 8.6%, Opera 4.5%, and Firefox, again, accounts for 53.1% of the user base.

For the Burningbird site, which has the oldest material and most visitors from Google, IE use increased to 25.9%. Firefox accounts for 16.2%, Opera for 4.5%, and Safari accounts for 6.6%. Who is the big winner at Burningbird? NetNewsWire, which accounts for 27% of file accesses at Burningbird. That's a lot of feed reads.

Finally, for Painting the Web, MSIE only accounts for 5.8% of the users, Safari accounts for 10.3%, Opera users have increased to 9.9% (those Opera folks, they love SVG), and last but not least, Firefox accounts for 65.1% of users at Painting the Web.

What does this all mean? It means that active readers of my sites are using Firefox much more than any other browser, while IE users tend to come in via search results on older posts. Safari users have increased, helped along, no doubt, by Apple's installing Safari on Windows machines, via a Quicktime upgrade. (Why on earth people would complain about Apple putting a standards-based browser on Windows, beats the hell out of me--would we prefer IE?)

Opera users form a good, consistent base at all of my sites, except for Painting the Web, which has double the number of Opera users. Again, I think people who like SVG also like Opera, which has been consistently a strong supporter of SVG.

In summary, at my sites at least, the number of people using IE is dropping. Most people who come to my site using MSIE do so through some Google or Yahoo search, seldom stay more than a quick look at a page, and then move on. Most are using older versions of MSIE, which implies (and the stats also bare this out) that they're using older versions of Windows and the Mac OS. I frankly never get IE8 beta testers, while I've consistently received larger numbers of beta testers for Firefox and Opera.

In other words, MSIE users do not make up a significant portion of my regular readership. More importantly, their numbers have dropped almost 50% from the statistics I had last year.

Now, it's true that the topics I write about tend to attract the tech community who, other than those who specifically work with IE, professionally, rarely use IE. I have two other sites opening later that cover non-tech fields, not to mention Just Shelley, which isn't going to be focused on technology. I'll check in about six months, and see how the statistics do at these and my other sites.

Regardless: Congratulations, Opera! Congratulations, Firefox!

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I never realized before that the difficulty with XHTML and allowing comments has a solution so breathlessly simple that I hit myself for not having seen it before.

I have configured the htmLawed module to "scrub" comments, but that wasn't the solution. The solution is not to allow a person to save a comment until they preview the comment, first. If the input is invalid XHTML, they won't see the form, or the form save button, in order to save the comment.

htmLawed should help with the accidentally invalid XHTML, and preview should help eliminate the deliberately invalid XHTML. We hope.

I've turned comments on. We'll see how it goes.

update

Yesterday I discovered that the htmLawed module was still allowing the infamous U+FFFF et al through, and submitted a bug. Today, the htmLawed Drupal module was just updated to point to htmLawed source 1.0.9, which neutralizes the illegal Unicode characters that caused so many problems with my Wordpress installations.

I am absolutely astonished at how fast and how responsive the htmLawed Drupal module developers are. I submitted a bug yesterday, and it was fixed by today. My comments should now be XHTML safe.

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On the same day I write in Just Shelley about the importance of longer writings, Nick Carr has an article in the New Atlantic's July issue on just this same topic. Nick asks, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I don't necessarily agree that we might be physically loosing the ability to focus on longer writings because of our exposure to the internet. In this writing, I give my opinion on what's happening, though I agree with Nick in the long term consequences.

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