According to an item on News.Com the City of Houston has begun to phase out Microsoft Office for its 13,000 city workers. Yup, dump it, get it off their desktops. Are they moving to OpenOffice or Corel or Linux KOffice? Nope. Here's the very best part: Rather than pick and choose which vendor you'd want to be chained to, the City of Houston is stepping out of the O/S Wars entirely by moving to SimDesk.

Back in the early 90's, Hiroshi Ishii (NTT) could go on for hours about "ubiquitous computing", computers everywhere, transparently, in all shapes and sizes and, presumably made by anyone and everyone from every corner of the industrialized world. "I want to call up a phone call in the kitchen, then walk into my den and pick up the 'call' there by touching my wall at the spot where the video should open...".

Ubiquitous computing.

I was recently working with a client on creating a web-based portal for emergency response. The client was far behind schedule in their infrastructure, so when we began, everyone had to be working from home where they had the essential ingredients of a computer, a desk and Internet. When they moved into the office, we were in the final stages of the deployment and their designer had to repeatedly ask me to re-send him specifications from our prior e-mail conversations.

"my emails are all at home"

Whether or not it works is another question, but the concept of SimDesk fits perfectly into Hiroshi's future-world. SimDesk offers a package of more than two dozen applications covering basic PC tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, calendars and e-mail. This data can be retrieved and manipulated from any device, so long as it has a Web connection. This can be cell phones, handheld computers, a loaner PC in the hotel business center or an internet cafe. It doesn't matter, the device is irrelevent. All that matters is the content and the control -- in my business, we call that the separation of the Model-View-Controller pattern, or MVC for short, and it's the Holy Grail of good portal design.

This MVC control is the purpose behind the Portal servers such as WebSphere and especially Jetspeed. Applications are just control actions over datasets, and the portal software is tasked with deciding the language, device and other personal interaction constraints to select the appropriate view for this particular connection. What Houston is hoping to get for their $9.5M, what my clients were asking me to build for their in-the-field oil and gas customers, was MVC applied across the internet connection. The Model, your data. Which controls you have may depend on the device, but the click to open the call in the kitchen PDA has an indistinguishable and predictable effect from the same action done on the den wall display panel, and so long as it all speaks standards like XHTML, who really cares who made the PDA or the wall display because they are no more part of the interaction equation than today when we only notice the make of our television when we buy and service it.