There is a race on to develop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the desktop between Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Sun Microsystems.

Those five are trying to wow us with examples of RIAs as cool widgets running inside or outside the browser, with some working when your PC or other device is offline.

Adobe’s technology is called AIR, Google has Gears, Microsoft has launched Silverlight and Mozilla plans Prism for its Firefox browser.

At Sun’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco today, the company touted JavaFX with three cool demos.

Connected Life is a widget that can exist as a Facebook or blog application or be dragged outside the browser. It combines feeds such as Twitter messages and Flickr photos to show you what your friends are up to. Photo Flocker allows Flickr users to search for photos by tags and throws up results in a 3D interface. Movie Cloud is a 3D sphere spinning around with dozens of high-definition videos that can be clicked on and played.

JavaFX apps were also shown working just as well on a mobile phone. Developers will be able to get their hands on a tool kit to build applications from July.

JavaOne also featured the rock star Neil Young. There was no performance of Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz’s favourite song, Rockin’ In the Free World, but a demonstration was given instead of how Java was helping to build the artist’s archive of his work on Blu-ray discs.

Young seems to have come up with the most imaginative use to date of Blu-ray’s new BD-Live interactive features. He has chronicled his life as an artist and plans to release the first period, 1963-1972, in the autumn.

That will take up 10 discs and at 50 gigabytes per dual-layer disc that could be 500GB of material, enough to satisfy even the most ardent fan. By the time he is finished, the life story could be a 50-disc collection.

The Blu-ray technology allows high-def audio to be played while listeners sift through relevant archival material such as photos, notes, videos and memorabilia such as concert tickets. The biography and timeline can also be updated by downloads and contributions from fans.

“Previously, there was no way to browse archival material on a disc and listen to a song in high resolution at the same time,” said Young.

“Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises. I am glad we waited and got it right.”

It has been more than a year since we flagged Twitter as the most buzzworthy social application in Silicon Valley. Thirteen months later, the micro-blogging site, which allows users to follow each others’ short online updates, has become an indispensible tool for the online cognoscenti who have gathered at San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Web 2.0 expo.

Jenn Van Grove, a social media consultant, says Twitter helps her follow the latest online buzz and keep in touch with hard-to-reach people. “If I need to get in touch with someone, Twitter is much faster than email,” she says. 

Ryan Kuder, a former Yahoo who is working on a new web startup, assured me that time invested keeping track of contacts on Twitter returns dividends.  ”People ask if you can spend too much time on Twitter,” he says. “I say you can’t spend enough.”

Sceptical journalist that I am, I signed up for Twitter in March of last year but never really got into the service. Intrigued, I dug out my Twitter ID and passed it along to Jenn, Ryan and a few other bloggers seated at our table inside the Web 2.0 blogger lounge. I have now been Twittering for all of two hours, and thanks to my new Twitter friends, I’ve managed to attract more than 50 followers.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Not got around to upgrading to Windows Vista yet? In that case you might want to delay a bit longer: it looks like the next version, Windows 7, is coming sooner than we thought.

That reaction is exactly what Microsoft is afraid of - and why it has been scrambling today to stamp on the suggestion that unlike Vista, which arrived years late, 7 (codenamed Blackcomb, after a Canadian ski resort) may actually arrive early.

Unforturnately the speculation will not be easy to kill. Bill Gates himself let the cat out of the bag by declaring he was “super-excited” about the next Windows in “the next year or so”. Yesterday, Microsoft said it planned to offer a version of Windows XP until June 2010 or a year after the launch of Windows 7, “whichever date is later” - an apparent indication that a date of June next year had been pencilled in for the launch of the new operating system.

A Microsoft spokesperson says nothing has changed, Windows 7 is still expected to take around three years from the consumer launch of Vista (January 2007) and maybe Gates was referring to the first beta version of the software.

Regardless of this attempt at obfuscation, what seems to be emerging is this: rather than slipping later into 2010, as some had expected, the next Vista is well on track and at least an advanced version of it will be on display in the first half of next year. That won’t help Vista, which is still recovering from all the bad publicity of its first year.

The betting among those who have been tracking Microsoft’s pursuit of international standards recognition for its Open Office XML formats (the voting by national standards bodies closed at the weekend) is that the software company will emerge victorious.

If correct, this is a significant breakthrough for Microsoft. To have lost would have handed a huge victory to the IBM-backed Open Document Format. The blessing of the ISO, on the other hand, would serve to further cement the de-facto standard that already exists around Office.

The official word from the ISO is not due until Wednesday, but Websites that have been trying to piece together the picture from individual national announcements point to what seems a big swing towards Microsoft among those countries that objected to OOXML as a standard when this came up for a vote last September. The Openmalaysia blog claims seven countries that had objected before have now either decided to support Microsoft or abstain - though the sourcing of much of this is far from clear (the UK’s decision to throw its weight behind Microsoft is attributed to open source standards lawyer Andy Updegrove.)

Until the formal count is in it would be rash to predict that this saga is over. But even hard-line opponents like the Groklaw blog now seem to have conceded Microsoft’s victory and have been left muttering about possible appeals against the way the ISO decision was reached.

Google’s anti-Microsoft strategy continues to unfold. Today brings news that its online Docs applications will soon step beyond the Web and onto the desktop. (This is accomplished with the Google Gears browser plug-in, which lets you access internet applications while offline by using the hard drive as a cache - a company representative offered to “whitelist” me so I can start using it today, but the less privileged among you will have to wait until this feature becomes generally available over “the next few weeks.”)

Google likes to cloak its new product features in uplifting rhetoric: the company only looks to delight its users, it isn’t motivated by the sort of competitive strategy that other companies employ, and so on. But the evolution of Docs has always looked like a very deliberate plan hatched with its Redmond rival in mind.

Early on, CEO Eric Schmidt talked down the capabilities of Docs as a rival for Office: the main attraction was the ability to share documents, spreadsheets and other files over the Web, and anyway browser-based apps were very poor relations of their desktop cousins. 

Then, nearly a year ago, the tune changed. Having rounded out Docs into an Office-like suite of apps, Google said it was adding “applications” to its corporate mission statement (alongside search and advertising.) For good measure, Schmidt said that online apps were starting to become a real alternative to desktop software since browser technology had advanced far faster than he had expected (what a surprise!)

Extending Docs offline looks like the next step. Giving users the ability to write, edit or view files while not connected to the Web (any changes are automatically synchronised with the version on Google’s servers once the machine goes online again) removes one of the main disincentives for using Docs.

Google’s leaders have at times given tell-tale hints about the real strategy here. Last year Mr Schmidt conceded that while many companies might not yet consider adopting Google’s applications, they were still likely to use the threat of switching away from Office as a way to get a better deal out of Microsoft. Thanks to the new offline capabilities, this negotitating leverage is about to get stronger.

  More than a year after the launch of Windows Vista, the first big upgrade is at hand (there’s no official word yet from Microsoft, but Amazon.com is offering the new, improved version for shipment tomorrow.)

Microsoft must be hoping the arrival of Service Pack 1 will mark a turning-point for one of its most troubled big software releases. After years of delay and a redesign that stripped some of the original core features out of the operating system, Windows Vista finally arrived with a slick “glass” interface and a whole bundle of glitches.

In terms of reputational damage, even that pales in comparison to the black eye from the recent revelation that Microsoft manipulated the marketing message for some PCs prior to the software’s launch  (it turned out that “Vista capable” meant anything but, at least if you wanted to run versions with the new interface, which most people did.)

The release of an SP1 is normally the signal for all-important corporate customers to start using the latest version of Windows. For Microsoft, the acid test for Vista is finally at hand.

 When Macromedia first tried to charge mobile phone companies for the privilege of carrying its Flash player for viewing video, even its own executives were surprised by their success. After all, the PC version of the player had always been free. That helped to attract a large number of eyeballs to the player, which in turn meant the company could sell software to creative types who wanted to produce content in Flash (that is the same business model behind Acrobat, the free PDF document reader supplied by Adobe, which went on to buy Macromedia.) Surprise, surprise: it turned out that mobile companies were actually prepared to pay for the player as well.

So when Steve Jobs bad-mouthed mobile Flash earlier this month it sounded very much like a heavy-handed attempt at public negotiation. The current version of the software is not up to scratch yet and won’t be appearing on the iPhone, according to the Apple boss (as my colleague Chris Nuttall wrote here last week, the lack of Flash is one reason third-party developers are sounding luke-warn about their new ability to write applications for the iPhone.) When I spoke to Gary Kovacs, Adobe’s vice president of mobile products, at the end of last week he was tight-lipped about relations with Apple but still managed to hint heavily that this was really about price rather than technical competence: negotiations with Apple are ongoing.

Strengthening Adobe’s negotiating hand will be the news today that even arch-enemy Microsoft is now prepared to pay for mobile Flash. Despite its own rival Silverlight software, Microsoft has signed a licence so that it can package the player with its own mobile software for hardware makers that don’t want to do the integration work themselves. Kovacs wouldn’t give a figure, but he confirmed that Microsoft will pay a per-player charge. With more than 500m Flash players already shipped inside mobile handsets and consumer electonics devices like the Wii and the PS3, this should further strengthen Adobe’s hand.

That makes the Apple/Adobe stand-off an early test of the iPhone’s market power. If Jobs can break the mold and get Flash for free, it will be a clear sign of how he intends to wield his new clout in the mobile world. That’s something that’s already making many in the technology and media industries sweat.

Nick Carr has been wondering whether Microsoft is about to embark on some “vast data center push” that will advance it much faster down the road towards cloud computing.

Not so, says Ray Ozzie. When I spoke to him last week, Microsoft’s chief software architect was nothing if not ambitious (one day, he said, “most major enterprises and many, many, many independent developers will be running their services in our datacentres” - this is the report of the conversation.) But this is what he had to say about the pace at which those datacentres will get built:

“If you step back and say, yes the company’s going to bet big, what is the most responsible [way] from an investor and business standpoint to do that? So you start by securing dark fibre, you start by securing land… and you start building the shells of buildings so that when you need the capacity the lead time is as short as possible to get that stuff in there. You never want to get caught with inadequate capacity at a certain point in time.

Right now the properties that predominatly use the capacity that we have are the MSN properties, the Windows live properties, and there are a lot of smaller ones. Search is the one that takes the majority of the physical computers in there. Over time that mix will shift just dramatically [towards running services for third parties.] As we produce platforms and tools that let third parties use our infrastructure, the nature of how we pre-purchase, how quickly we purchase, will depend on how popular those services are.”

For Microsoft, that new business has barely begun: 

“We’re going to our enterprise customers saying, help us to help you understand how quickly you’d like to go from a world of servers to a world of mixed servers and services, or just pure services. Third party developers, we’re not even in the game yet.

I think expecting a step function of suddenly day one we have 50 new datacentres, I don’t believe that it’s actually going to transpire that way, simply because of the risks involved with taking on this new model.”

A week ago Adobe plunged deeper into Microsoft territory as it formally launched AIR, software which is meant to let applications run seamlessly outside the browser on both the Web and on disconnected PCs. This is a direct pitch to Microsoft’s core constituency: developers who have traditionally written for desktop machines but now want to tap into a hybrid Web/PC platform.

Here in Las Vegas today, Microsoft hit back. Its annual MIX conference has become an important venue for a group of people who have traditionally sat firmly in the Adobe camp: designers and creators of light-weight Web applications who do not fit the traditional Microsoft developer mold.

Leaving aside the always-awkward experience of watching Microsoft executives trying to look and sound hip in front of an audience like this, the technology on display looks pretty slick. The centrepieces are a new version of Silverlight, the Flash-type plug-in whose debut last year won Microsoft unexepected kudos among Web developers, and the first public demonstration of the IE8 browser.

The new browser (a beta version of which was released today to developers) shows that Microsoft, having fallen behind Mozilla’s Firefox in the innovation stakes, is trying to raise its game. New features should eventually make the Web easier to use. One, called “Activities,” will let users copy and paste parts of Web pages into each other, making it possible to access other Web services from inside a Web page. Another, “Webslices”, brings RSS feeds into the browser so that they can be combined more easily with other Web content (there’s a good description of how it all works here.)

IE8 also marks an important watershed for Microsoft. For the first time, the most widely-used browser on the Web will implement all the most common browser standards. Announcing this earlier in the week, Microsoft put it down to its new committment to interoperability, announced with great fanfare late last month. But as Mary Jo Foley and other bloggers have argued, this looks a bit disingenuous: in fact, unhappiness on the part of developers probably pushed Microsoft in this direction. Still, it represents something new, as even adversaries like Opera (whose complaint to the EC about Microsoft’s refusal to support standards in its browser is now under official investigation) have been forced to concede.

Microsoft and Intel have been in such a lockstep for so long in their promotion of the Windows operating system powered by x86 microprocessors that they have earned the moniker Wintel.

But when does such co-operation reach inappropriate levels?

One among a series of internal Microsoft emails, unsealed by a federal judge in a case alleging PCs labelled “Vista Capable” could not fully run its latest operating system, suggests a line may have been crossed.

In the email, dated February 26 last year, John Kalkman, a general manager handling relations with PC makers, answered why PCs using Intel’s 915 graphics chipset were allowed in 2006 to have “Vista capable” logos, when they could not run advanced features such as Vista’s 3D “Aero” interface:

“In the end, we lowered the requirement [for Vista capability] to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded,” he wrote.

Another Microsoft employee, Mike Ybarra, says in a 2006 email that the decision to lower the graphics requirements for the “Vista capable” logo was a mistake:

“We are caving to Intel…we are really burning HP…we are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience,” he wrote.

Intel did have a tough year in 2006, prior to Vista going on sale at the beginning of 2007, but a company spokesman has strongly denied that Mr Kalkman could have had any knowledge of its internal financial forecasts related to chipsets and motherboards.

In another email, first reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows, writes:

“Intel has the biggest challenge. Their “945″ chipset which is the baseline Vista set “barely” works right now and is very broadly used. The “915″ chipset which is not Aero capable is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged as “Vista Capable” but not Vista Premium. I don’t know if this was a good call.”

Microsoft’s response to the content of the emails is that they “reflect part of an active discussion about how best to implement the Windows Vista Capable program.” The programme was introduced in April 2006 to maintain the sales momentum of Windows XP PCs while escalating the “buzz” for the forthcoming Vista.

The class-action lawsuit alleges consumers were misled by the programme into thinking they were buying PCs that could be upgraded to the new operating system and run all of Vista’s key features. The emails reveal that retailers themselves had qualms about Microsoft lowering the technical requirements for its logo.

Microsoft could perhaps have avoided any legal action if it had taken Wal-Mart’s advice, contained in this internal memo from a Microsoft employee:

“[Wal-Mart is] extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue. They would like to see Microsoft reconsider the program and allow for the use of 2 different logos; one that is strictly a Windows Vista Home Basic Capable [the barebones version of Vista], and the other Windows Vista Capable.”