The news that Microsoft is offering financial incentives to enterprise customers that adopt its new Live Search engine seems to be about data.

As part of the arrangement, companies using Live Search agree to send search data (presumably anonymized) to Microsoft, which should help Ballmer’s boys figure out how to optimize the platform — and maybe even

make some money from it. That kind of continuous data flow has worked well for Google, which offers users advanced features in exchange for sharing their data when they install the Google toolbar.

But I suspect that this move isn’t about search per se. Let’s be realistic: Microsoft isn’t going to unseat Google, which holds a massive lead in the search market. This is more about gaining a toehold for the fledgling Windows Live services. Think of Live Search as a gateway drug that will give potential customers a taste of a whole new MS portfolio of products.

Live Search, though it can be run in standalone mode, is part of the Windows Live platform of online apps and services. You can personalize it (see MyYahoo) and use it to search your desktop (a la Google Desktop or the search that’s built intoVista). Many users will also be tempted to run their search from the Live Toolbar, which is offered as part of the larger Windows Live ensemble. It’s only a small step from Live Search to getting the whole shooting match.

So this is about paying for exposure, which ultimately can lead to habituation. Microsoft’s engineers have built a passel of handsome, modern looking Web-based applications. It even has “gadgets” (an answer to OS X’s widgets). These offerings may not be best of breed — going up, as they do, against Google’s online office apps — but familiarity is a powerful force. People tend to stick with whatever makes them comfortable.

The hosted online applications business could ultimately dwarf the search market, since people use search on occasion, but they live in their apps. MS has made a fortune selling desktop apps; if even some of that user base moves to the Web, Microsoft must be there to capture the business. Live Search is just one more way to lead them gently to that promised land.

Everybody agrees that data integration is a difficult task. But could it ever be accomplished via SaaS (Software as a Service), with integration services being provided online?

Pervasive Software believes it can. The company in the next 12 months plans to offer integration via a SaaS model, said Mike Hoskins, chief technology officer at Pervasive.

He

served on a panel at the OpSource SaaS Summit 2007 event Thursday that discussed SaaS in the enterprise and integrating it with behind-the-firewall systems. Panelists acknowledged this is a tough subject. One audience member, meawhile, recalled an incident in which a friend of his recently wanted to integrate with a SaaS application.

“What came in the door was a CD with 10 consultants,” the audience member said. He then asked if integration would ever be offered as a service.

“The short answer is, yes, there will be integration as a service,” but the endpoints almost always involve some legacy applications behind the firewall, Hoskins said.

Afterward, he noted Pervasive’s SaaS plans will include integration. He had called integration around SaaS “a huge opportunity” during the panel session.

Cisco Systems Inc. continued its push into the unified communications and collaboration space Thursday, agreeing to buy WebEx, an on-demand collaboration apps vendor, for $3.2 billion.

In a statement, Cisco said it will pay $57 a share for WebEx and hopes to use the WebEx technologyt and services portfolio to complement its own unified communications

and collaboration products. WebEx will also give Cisco a toe hold in the SMB market, according to Charlie Giancarlo, Chief Development Officer at Cisco.

“As collaboration in the workplace becomes increasingly important, companies are looking for rich communications tools to help them work more effectively and efficiently. The combination of Cisco and WebEx will deliver compelling solutions accelerating this next wave of business communications,” Giancarlo said.

Stay tuned….

Microsoft will not be releasing a successor to its Visual FoxPro 9 developer tool, the company said this week.

The company will continue to support Visual FoxPro 9 through 2015 and will release Service Pack 2 for the product this summer, featuring enhancements in reporting and bug fixes. But there will be no version 10, Microsoft said on its MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) site.

The company is, however, working on a project codenamed Sedna that is built using the extensibility model of Visual FoxPro 9 and provides features such as enhanced connectivity to SQL Server and integration with parts of the .Net Framework.

Microsoft said the community has been using the company’s CodePlex open source project site to enhance Visual FoxPro with improvements such as an object-oriented menu system and an enhanced class browser.

“To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007,” Microsoft said.

Visual FoxPro has been geared toward making 32-bit database applications and components. In recent years, the company has been emphasizing its Visual Studio development environment.

Good software security is not something that happens by accident, a security expert told the audience at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Thursday morning.

In a presentation entitled, “Software Security: Uncut and Uncensored,” Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist at People Security and an author on the subject, drove home the reality that software security

is a difficult endeavor. A focused effort is required to make an application secure, he said.

Critical changes are happening in the industry, he added. “The way applications communicate with each other is really changing pretty substantially,” with much data flowing over a single port, that being Port 80, Thompson said.

Another change is regulatory compliance and its consequences. Customers are demanding different things in software, such as the ability to encrypt log files, Thompson said.

Now, companies have to inform the public of software security issues. Meanwhile, stealing identities has become a profitable business, Thompson said.

“Competition among bad guys has driven the price of an ID down to a buck,” said Thompson.

Often, security competes with other project goals, such as finishing the project, he said. Security needs must be balanced with other goals, said Thompson. But security expertise is lacking amongst code writers.

“Most people [have] not taken a security class,” Thompson said.

To boost security, he advised peer reviews to find issues with quality, gathering of customer security requirements and thinking broadly about where a software product might be deployed. Regulatory requirements also must be factored in, as well as perhaps additional auditing capability.

Also, developers should be educated on how to think about security; code reviews should be performed on critical components.

“Threat modeling is also incredibly effective,” Thompson said.

Developers even can think of an “abuse case” for a piece of code to test it out, he said. Fuzz testing, to feed an application with inputs that might reveal bugs, also is a good idea.

Other recommendations from Thompson included developing a secure deployment guide, documenting security assumptions and learning from mistakes.

Open source software strategist Robert Lefkowitz, who spent more than 30 years as a software architect and systems designer in places such as Wall Street, brought his observations to the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Wednesday.

Lefkowitz, also known as r0ml, pondered situations of open source, such as noting that free software will put

out of business anything that is of worse quality. To charge money, the software has to be better than what is free.

Citing a recent survey that said the Eclipse IDE was last in user satisfaction, Lefkowitz said by definition it has to be of poor quality because it is free.

“At equilibrium, the open source software is always the crappiest software you can get,” he said.

The open source software movement arose when Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation sought out source code for a malfunctioning printer driver but could not get it. “It offends Richard because he wants to fix the bug himself,” Lefkowitz said.

Open source, is about “taking the law into your own hands,” so users can fix the software themselves. Open source is useful when users do not trust the vendor to provide quality software, according to Lefkowitz.

Ironically, both Microsoft commercial software licenses and the GNU General Public License carry disclaimers against liability, he said.

Lefkowitz also noted ironies in patents, in that they are approved of for pharmaceutical companies but frowned on in software. Tongue in cheek, he said “greedy” persons such as Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, never helped humanity. Showing a photo of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Lefkowitz said the software industry instead has “noble, good-hearted people.”

But Lefkowitz also displayed a photo of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has taken up philanthropy on a large scale lately. Using further sarcasm, Lefkowitz said it was inconceivable that someone who made billions of dollars in software would just give away billions of dollars to fight disease.

Lefkowitz also speculated that in the future, an IDE will be a rich media document with pictures, text, chaptered headings and tables of contents and that it will be simple enough because it will need to be used by everybody. He then displayed a photo of a product box for Microsoft Word 2000, suggesting that could be the prototype IDE.

In a phone call yesterday afternoon, Opsware CTO Tim Howes offered three reasonable reasons for Opsware’s acquisition of IT process automation vendor iConclude, which the company announced earlier that morning.

First, customers often want to draw additional value out of Opsware’s provisioning and configuration management solutions

by integrating them with ticketing, monitoring, and other IT management solutions, and iConclude helps glue all of these things together.

Second, on top of the glue, iConclude allows customers to automate high level process flows; for example, a change management process might open a trouble ticket, instruct the monitoring system to cease monitoring, instruct the load balancer to take the target servers out of the queue, prompt the patch manager to apply the patch, and then reverse through all of these steps and close the ticket.

Third, for organizations adopting the ITIL process methodology, iConclude completes the three-part story for Opsware, adding general process automation to the existing change management and CMDB offerings.

Opsware and iConclude have been partnering for some time, and they share many customers in common. Many of those customers are large shops, but Howes said that process automation is not strictly a big man’s game. “You don’t have to get that big before you realize you have a problem that automation can solve,” he noted.

Andi Mann, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, believes the acquisition gives Opsware a level of orchestration or process automation that clearly exceeds direct competitors such as Opsware, and may even eclipse the process automation capabilities of the “big four,” namely BMC, CA, HP, and IBM.

“The acquisition certainly brings Opsware up into the realm of say Symantec or even to an extent IBM Tivoli, in terms of being able to compete at that level of the market,” Mann said.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is seeking browser vendors, application developers and content designers to help design the next version of HTML.

The organization is announcing on Wednesday a new W3C HTML Working Group, which will solicit participation from W3C members and others.

“HTML started simply, with structured markup, no licensing

requirements, and the ability to link to anything. More than anything, this simplicity and openness has led to its tremendous and continued success,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of HTML, in a statement released by W3C. “It’s time to revisit the standard and see what we can do to meet the current community needs, and to do so effectively with commitments from browser manufacturers in a visible and open way.”

In detailing the history of HTML, W3C said that after publication of HTML 4 and following a 1998 workshop, W3C planned to turn HTML into an XML-based format called XHTML. Because of the legacy of Web content that was some variant of HTML, traditional browser vendors moved slowly to adopt XHTML. Content developers had little motivation to adopt XHTML for the desktop.

Leaders in the Web developer and design communities urged W3C to renew its commitment to HTML by adding new features. Now, W3C will re-launch work on HTML.

Also, W3C said XHTML has proved valuable in markets such as mobile devices and enterprise applications. Design aims for XHTML 2.0 include keeping it as generic as possible and reusing applicable XML standards such as XForms.

With W3C’s charting of the XHTML 2 Working Group, meanwhile, W3C will continue work on the language at the same time it considers re-branding the technology. W3C also has re-chartered the HTML Coordination Group and Forms Working Group. The Forms group will continue work on the XForms architecture.

It may be quite a while before there is a major upgrade to the base Eclipse platform. But developers of Eclipse technology and others attending the EclipseCon conference this week already have some good ideas on what they would like to see.

Participants in a Tuesday evening session about the future of Eclipse detailed a laundry list of proposed improvements

for what was called the 4.0 version of Eclipse. Among these include a ribbon-like interface similar to Microsoft’s new Windows Vista platform. Improved scalability, including accommodations for multi-core processors, also was suggested. Increased software componentization may be part of an upgrade as well.

A suggestion of an API replacement drew applause, but one speaker noted that breaking the API is very challenging for consumers. Java improvements also could be added to Eclipse, along with simpler ways to construct Eclipse plug-ins.

“If we want to talk about what the next Eclipse should be, it should be one that will [suit] us for the next five years,” said Kevin McGuire, a member of the Eclipse Project’s project management committee.

But it looks like this wish list will take time. In an interview on Tuesday, Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said he did not see any Eclipse 4.0 being released before 2009.

Microsoft posted on Tuesday Visual Studio fixes geared to Windows Vista and an interview with a key executive touting Vista as a platform for application development.

The interview features S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division. Release of the interview coincides with the availability

of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Vista. The update, found here, fixes some problems with using Visual Studio to build Vista applications. Although initially planned for release late in the week, the Vista update is ready now it was completed sooner than expected.

“With this update to Visual Studio, our goal was to ensure developers have the best possible experience on Windows Vista, and that the features developers are using in Visual Studio work as expected,” Somasegar said. “We fixed a number of significant issues around debugging and profiling, and around creating ASP.Net applications for IIS on the developer machine.”

“Windows Vista gives developers a whole new canvas for creating cutting-edge applications, and we are already seeing a lot of exciting third-party solutions coming to life, including ultra-realistic 3-D programs, novel mini-applications called ‘gadgets,’ engaging high-definition, animated programs and Web sites, and innovative applications from new-media, retail and education companies,” he said.