Today, Marc Benioff, the ever-vocal CEO of salesforce.com made a blog post over at Fortune on the end of Microsoft. In his post he outlines Microsoft’s latest ad campaigns, the ones spouting off about Windows 7 being "my idea." He pokes fun at one in particular where Windows no longer crashing was somehow deemed a feature.

Is that how low our expectations are these days? Certainly not in general, and it is a sad state of affairs for Microsoft that crashing is one of the expected behaviors of a Windows device.

He goes on further to point out the explosive growth and success of sites like Facebook and YouTube. These consumer websites have absolutely changed people’s expectations of what a web experience should be like: engaging, easy to navigate and providing loads of value.

Here at Model Metrics those themes ring true for everything we build. We do nothing but cloud computing, which is really what Facebook and YouTube are all about. Computing in the workplace has historically lagged behind what’s available at home. That’s no longer true. With technology from salesforce.com, Google, Adobe and Apple getting things done at the office is as easy as using your favorite personal websites.

While Microsoft isn’t leaving any time soon, newer technologies are showing better promise than the failed paradigm of machines prone to crashing.

At long last, the oft-rumored VMForce has been officially announced.

Huh?

VMForce is a technology brought about by a partnership between salesforce.com and VMware,     the leader in virtualization technology. VMForce enables Java applications to run on Force.com infrastructure, the robust development platform built by the folks at salesforce.com.

What does all of that mean?

Java is one of the most widely used development languages in the world. It is a mature technology with millions of active developers, with more applications running than can likely be counted. With VMForce, many of those applications can now be migrated easily to run in the cloud.

These applications will then be available anywhere, on almost any device. They are instantly social, searchable, and scalable. And since they’re on Force.com, you get great security and visibility into uptime.

I had some issues over the weekend trying to import an Flex Builder 3 AIR project into Flash Builder 4. This post gives a good description of how it is supposed to work, and I assume that it does work for Flex web projects, but it didn’t work for me with an AIR project. Every time I imported the AIR project, Flash Builder 4 interpreted it as a Flex Web project, so of course it didn’t actually build. I was migrating from an OSX Flex Builder 3 to a Windows Flash Builder 4, so that may also have been an issue, I’m not sure.

Anyway, the way I finally got it working was to create a new AIR Desktop project in Flash Builder 4 and copy the entire src folder over from the Flex Builder 3 project. The only thing that you can’t copy is the app.xml file, as it seems to be in a slightly different format in FB4, and the project won’t build.

SVN

This causes some problems if you want to continue a development effort using SVN, and other members of your team are using Flex Builder 3, because the actual project can’t be shared between the two versions of the IDE. However, the src folder can be shared without issue, so if you check just that folder out into your new Flash Builder 4 Project shell, and over-write the app.xml file you’ll be good to go, just don’t accidentally commit the app.xml file to the repository, or you’ll break the build for everybody else.

Salesforce chatter has been gaining market buzz over the past month or so, especially after salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff posted a guest blog on TechCrunch on what he calls the "Facebook Imperative." His point wasn’t just to get people talking about his own social platform, but to make people realize just how far technology has come in the past 10 years.

Salesforce has always set out to make enterprise applications (the stuff you use at work) as easy to use as the applications and websites you use at home. Salesforce Chatter is going to do for the workplace what Facebook has done for personal communications. Things will move much more quickly and relationships will grow.

The ability to update your co-workers enmasse without spamming them and filling their already overfull inboxes represents the biggest difference between push and pull communications. Salesforce claims that since rolling out Chatter internally their email volume dropped by 40%. Imagine how much time that would save you in a given day! 

Got an interest in cloud computing? Wondering what all the hype is about? Listen in to CloudCast, a weekly podcast running anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes. We meander a bit from enterprise applications to consumer applications, but if you’ve ever wanted to get the inside story on what’s hot, find it here in iTunes.

EDIT: The standard RSS link is here – http://www.modelmetrics.com/cloudcast.xml