Sun’s difficult position has been covered here, in business circles, and even in the land of puppets. So when Jonathan Schwartz surfaces with the launch of JavaFX 1.0, naturally the question in everyone’s mind is how exactly a client technology is going to advance Sun’s position in the marketplace as it downsizes to avoid a possible collapse.

Schwartz comes out swinging in the video embedded below, talking of Java’s strong position on desktops and what he calls the majority of mobile devices. He frames the discussion around the desire of companies to escape from the lock-in of the browser, dividing the world conceptually between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google Chrome (presumably including Firefox and its growing share.) As he details a range of screens through which to project Java power, you can even see an iPhone on the far right though Java, like Flash, is shut out of the Apple smartphone.

The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.

Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.

JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.

If Twitter wants to make money, it needs to do to others what they’ve been trying to do to Twitter. That is, extend its lead in market share by solving the problem of cross-platform micromessaging. With activity streams from Facebook, Microsoft, MySpace, FriendFeed, and a score of smaller players flowing over RSS, XMPP, and HTTP Push, Twitter can consolidate its power by cloning the best of its competitors’ offerings.

Key to this jujitsu is the understanding of what constitutes a micromessage. Though Twitter’s competitors for the most part frame the issue as one of interoperability, in fact Twitter is in the unique position to define the platform on its own terms. If Twitter provides tools that allow users to integrate their messages, social graph, and discovery mechanisms with all other systems, Twitter in effect becomes the Post Office of the new messaging paradigm.

FriendFeed has done an exceptional job in the last few months modeling this strategy, and soon will reach a tipping point where it will be worth assembling a near replica of the high value parts of a Twitter Follow and discovery cloud. Already you can use the Imaginary Friends functionality to aggregate “friends” from multiple services, and create a Friends List and associated realtime feed to simulate much of the Twitter UI. But Twitter’s embargo of realtime Track data keeps other services from exploiting the Twitter user base as an organic messaging cloud akin to Google’s search cloud.

It seemed almost like the Good Old Days when everyone waited on Microsoft to show their cards before doing anything. While Adobe took over Moscone West in San Francisco for its MAX developer conference, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Online Services operation at the St. Regis 3 blocks away before an audience of press, analysts, bloggers, and most importantly, business partners. As one Adobe high up said, “Microsoft is focused on the enterprise.”

Google’s release of its Gmail Video service is noteworthy for several reasons. It is integrated into the Gmail console, adding voice and video services to the realtime console that is being built out around XMPP. It is remarkably easy to use; Dan Farber just called to test the service and I popped the window out and continued chatting with him while returning to this post. Several alerts on Yammer and Friendfeed’s realtime IM competed briefly in other chat windows. Oh, and Google just added about a quarter of its version of Silverlight to my MacBook Air. Call it Silverlite.

Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor joined the Gillmor Gang this afternoon to discuss Friendfeed’s XMPP stream of its Home and Friends List feeds. I sat with Taylor at the Friendfeed offices and Marc Canter joined intermittently by phone. Canter took the opportunity to vent about Friendfeed’s responsibility to exert leadership in the XMPP space before his line unexpectedly went dead.

The video below joins the conversation just before that point, and continues with discussion of Friendfeed’s new direction and role with the release of the realtime technologies. While Taylor acknowledged the possible threat to some companies (read Twitter) of providing access to the full firehose of data, he indicated building confidence in allowing businesses on top of the Friendfeed APIs was more valuable for Friendfeed.

At the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, a context switch from Web 2.0 to cloud computing is well under way. Wired’s Kevin Kelly suggested a variation of the Semantic Web where pages give way to the data on the pages, with each of those chunks representing real objects in physical space, or as Kelly said, anything that can hold an electric charge.

AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega told Mike Arrington that he foresaw a world where phones controlled TVs, coffee machines, cars, and every other device along the way to and from work. The notion of a universal remote or mouse as Microsoft Research defined it years ago is now becoming an economic reality, one that de la Vega suggests is recession-immune as of now. The presence of a keyboard, whether physical as per the Blackberry Bold or virtual on the iPhone, is the new dividing line, with AT&T deriving north of $95 a month revenue versus $58 per month for the average user.

Salesforce’s DreamForce developer conference opens Monday morning with the announcement of a new Force.com Sites service. Sites is a new business for Salesforce, potentially extending the thousands of Force.com applications by pushing application data to the Web over Salesforce servers.

In doing so, Salesforce becomes even more of a channel for larger cloud players such as Google and Amazon, and even Microsoft to the extent that Force.com developers are free to integrate services such as Mesh and even Silverlight.

Although Marc Benioff dismisses such an alliance, he’ll have to work fast to expand Force.com outward as Microsoft comes after him from the outside in. Fertile ground may lie in harnessing Google apps and realtime services to populate Sites-enabled applications with smart information services based on targeted user behavior derived from Gmail, Google Reader, IM, and micromessaging. Salesforce can provide tomorrow’s Azure services today while using fear of Microsoft overwhelming the industry again to encourage Google and other RIA cloud players such as Adobe to federate around Salesforce as a rallying point for the enterprise.

So much of this long protracted struggle for political change has rubbed off on the tech community. In the partisan windup to this long election process, we’ve become almost inured to the fact that as much as things will continue to be the same, already the “choice” between the two candidates has produced one sure thing. That is, either of the two candidates represents fundamental change from the status quo, no matter how much you want to differentiate further.

So it is with the shift to the Cloud. Whether you’re betting on Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or less obviously Apple, IBM, Oracle, or Cisco, the sure thing is that Web services has gone main stream. If this is a horse race at the vendor level, it’s about each company’s ability to harness its innate strengths and migrate its weaknesses. Put another way, the battle is within, not between.

Sun Microsystems is on the ropes. The New York Times says so, the hallway conversation starts and ends with “too bad”, and the wagons appear to be circling around, or rather, behind Jonathan Schwartz, leaving him outside the fort as the gates are closed.

Much of this capitulation to a situation Sun has been in for some time could come from the lessons of this long struggle in our country’s political and economic systems, which have become inextricably intertwined to the point where it apparently matters not at all what either candidate does or proposes. Instead, the public intuition is that change in management is less risky then standing pat.

With all this pressure on Schwartz, perhaps the best way to view the situation is to determine a so-called Failsafe deadline, so described as the point in time beyond which nuclear bombers can not turn back from their missions. In Sun’s case, what difference would a change in leadership make, and at what point?

Three years to the day from his corner-turn memo about changing Microsoft’s direction from software to software plus services and after two days of keynotes, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie reviewed the launch of the Windows Azure cloud OS and forthcoming online versions of the Office suite.

Ozzie: It’s fun that it’s all coming together. It was Mary Jo [Foley] yesterday who pointed out that today is three years to the day that I wrote that initial Services memo – the disruptions thing.

Gillmor: The San Francisco thing…

Ozzie: Right, what a disaster that was… When there’s no Internet access when we’re trying to show how the company’s going live…

Gillmor: Obviously, it’s a bit of jujitsu to get to the Web with Office.

Ozzie: The the way that they’ve done it.. a few years ago when they were in the planning phase of this next wave, it was basically, what approach should we take? Should we race to the finish line and have something that was complementary with the base Office or should we do it in a way that guarantees compatibility so that we could implement things and have the same back end so that the same file formats would be … it would have their full richness and so on? And that’s the route they went and I think for the customer it’ going to end up being the right route. If you happen to be at a kiosk or wherever, you can use the document where it happens to be stored,and people who are using the PCs will not have any clue that you used whatever – it will just work.

Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and Amitabh Srivastava participated in an informal blogger roundtable this afternoon at Microsoft’s Professional Developer conference. Although the morning keynote focused on Windows Azure’s infrastructure, Ozzie delved briefly into some of tomorrow’s announcements, implying that there might be surprises in the area of Office applications deployed on top of Azure. Srivastava confirmed that one of the demos featured a glimpse of an online version of Microsoft Word.

Muglia and Ozzie reminisced briefly of problems in Hailstorm that still aren’t solved with Azure. Muglia credited Identity architect Kim Cameron with important work in identity federation that is just now seeing the light of day in Azure’s automated identity provisioning. And Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said sometimes people can get really enamored, overengineering the platform for the platform’s sake. He suggested apps developed during Azure’s community preview release beta will be much more important in driving the cloud platform forward.

Microsoft and Ray Ozzie cracked the door half open this morning on Windows Azure, the infrastructure formerly known as Windows Cloud. In the process, Ozzie served notice that IT will remain in the Windows/Office grip but with an abstraction layer that blurs the on-premise and on-demand worlds.

The outlines of Live Mesh’s role as arbiter of this abstraction were there to be inferred, but the details of how the Azure service bus arbitrates things like federated identity, workflow services, and overall services management will be left to Tuesday’s keynote. But the leisure with which Ozzie and his lieutenants roll out the announcements belies the speed with which Microsoft is executing this corner turn.

Thursday night Twitter engineer Alex Payne finally acknowledged the obvious regarding the firehose – the full stream of data sought after by third-party developers to add back the long-withheld Track service. Twitter executives have been all over the map on this, sending developers on a wild goose chase to obtain access to the XMPP stream that the company has failed to provide since May.

Payne’s post describes how Twitter provided the firehose “on an experimental basis some months ago, but had to limit its distribution to just a few subscribers while we worked on technical hurdles.” At BearHug Camp, developers were told to contact Gnip as an intermediary, but now Payne says Twitter has decided to keep the service in-house with a newly-staffed team and yet another undetermined delta between promise and reality.

Update: Friendfeed today released support for its Beta Real-Time feature. The API adds the ability to fetch realtime streams based on the Home, Room, and Friends List updates as they occur. While Friends Lists offer a way to port social graph data of your Twitter Follows to the Friendfeed platform, co-founder Bret Taylor said that was not yet available through the API “though we should add those methods in the future.”

Friendfeed’s launch of realtime services has set off a serious horse race on the micromessaging platform. While the New York Times contrasts Twitter and Yammer as eyeballs versus revenue, or consumer v. enterprise, Friendfeed finds itself positioned as an attractive candidate for building scoped message hubs without an IT oversight requirement.

Twitter appears to have an unassailable lead in users and their resultant Follow clouds. Though Track is dead and IM is postponed indefinitely, the service has added a political track page with a company-selected keyword cluster around the political race. The result: a rapid flow of unmoderated comments with no social graph or conversational elements. As a commercial for Twitter’s dominant market share, it underlines both the potential and the uselessness of the product for its contributors. In other words, can I get you a pillow for your spot in our trunk….

Enterprise IT looks at the emergence of cloud computing with mixed emotions. On the one hand, financial tough times breed layoffs, consolidation, and outsourcing away from IT’s control. On the other, a new breed of cloud-aware managers look to rationalize the metrics, security, and regulation challenges a distributed model brings. In the middle are companies such as Sonoa Systems, who just announced the closing of a $10 million Series C round of funding, led by Third Point Ventures with current investors Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and SAP Ventures.

Sonoa sits in the middle of the API party, with a $50,000 box that proxies and manages a company’s cloud computing services. The ServiceNet appliance, or a virtual VMWare image for those who have their own hardware at $30K, lets IT manage customers of a company’s APIs with a single policy management system located at the edge of the enterprise. The product provides a library of out-of-the-box policies for content-based metering, profile-based access control, credential mediation, protocol interoperability, and governance, security, compliance, and audit tools.

It took a worldwide financial meltdown for Twitter to finally cough up the IM hairball. At BearHug Camp, I spent about 10 of the 30 minute executive visitation trying to pin down Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Alex Payne on when exactly Track and IM would be back, and in what order. Turns out the IM part isn’t coming back; it’s been moved from Broken to Build.

Evan Williams delivers the bad news with a refreshing frankness, suggesting the ROI of IM services for a small percentage of Twitter users puts it down the list below other more pressing priorities. And at the bottom of the email, he points at a fledgling third-party service that gives you a way of “tweeting” over the Jabber XMPP gateway. The author is mulling how to provide access to users’ follows. No mention is made of Track, of course.

SocialText 3.0 is (or will be in the near term) an enterprise mashup of Facebook, FriendFeed, enterprise microblogging, and the wiki. If you were to take any one of these constituencies – social networking, conversation aggregation, Tw*tter, or vanilla wikis and the leveraged sites the technology has produced – you might not think of SocialText as a major player or competitor with the exception of the enterprise wiki space. But add these together and get out ahead of both the market and the logical expansion plans of larger players, and SocialText 3.0 may have something hard to disrupt.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen enterprise Twitter clones appearing from many companies both big and small. The central conceit of these apps is integration with business processes inside the corporate firewall. In most cases, the services leverage the Twitter use case: semi-public SMS-length comments with very little conversational threading but live search capabilities called track that allow group collaboration to be aggregated. Layered on top of the message data is a taxonomy derived from each user’s Follow cloud of colleagues, data feeds, and competitive analysis.

This week two giants spoke to the technology wave known as cloud computing. Larry Ellison called it a new label on what everyone is doing already. He acknowledged he was going along with it to keep his marketing and sales guys happy, but basically he called bullshit on it.

Steve Ballmer talked at a deep level about intelligent caching between the cloud and the client. Over an hour of snappy questions by Ann Winblad and Obamaesque nuance from the Microsoft leader let some significant cat out of the bag. No longer software plus services, the net of Ballmer’s signals was cloud + client. If you believe as Jason Calacanis does that we’re on the brink of a startup depression, the technology industry should be very very afraid.

Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers – 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers – the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted “full and complete” streaming coverage of all speeches.

The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.