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At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

Since its inception, Windows Server has been carried a unique, embedded burden: Windows itself. From the beginning, there hasn't been much justification for all the graphical resources one requires from a client operating system inhabiting a server. Now with remote management evolving away from virtual sessions, and with server OS images becoming virtualized almost by default, Windows Server doesn't really need even the option of the Aero environment.

Last week in Anaheim, in amongst the crowd of developers at Microsoft's Build 2011 conference assimilating the news about Windows 8, was a team from a London, U.K.-based company called YoYo Games. In 2000, that company released an interesting entry-level game development and distribution platform called, quite simply, GameMaker. Following in the hallowed footsteps of the great computer game platforms of the 1980s and '90s, it introduced a stand-alone interpreter whose language borrowed a bit from Pascal.

One of the more appreciated announcements to come out of last week's Microsoft Build 2011 conference was that Hyper-V, the company's hypervisor and virtual machine manager for high-end servers, would be coming to the Windows 8 client. (While we heard the words "every Windows 8 client," we'll reserve judgment on whether it gets included in the lower-end SKUs.)

The story was covered as "Virtualization Comes to Windows Client." Well, anyone who uses Windows 7 on a regular basis knows it was already there, at least in some form: Microsoft had already integrated its Virtual PC system into Hyper-V since its earliest betas. But Virtual PC is not Hyper-V, for reasons any administrator can tell you: The virtual machine (VM) configuration files in Hyper-V are far more detailed than those of the consumer-grade Virtual PC (WVPC).

There are any number of reasons you may want to praise the new usage model being previewed by Microsoft for Windows 8. Like many, you may come to appreciate the company's apparently enhanced understanding of the requirements of the mobile user. Financial analysts had been worried about whether Microsoft could address a tablet PC skill set with an operating system born and raised on the desktop.

At last, you may join the chorus in saying, the desktop is dead and "the world is moving to mobile." If there is one prevailing truth about this industry in the past quarter-century, it's that things that are dead are the hardest to kill. (For more, see "Reed Hastings," "DVD.")

One of the unambiguous messages we heard from Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim all last week was that development of HTML5 "Metro-style apps" for Windows 8 would be "plug-in free." All requests for Microsoft to "clarify" that rule only underscored the blunt reality of the statement: HTML5 is about the absence of plug-ins, and thus, Metro will have an absence of plug-ins, including Microsoft's own Silverlight.

In a company blog post dated last Thursday, Adobe platform business developer Danny Winokur said his company expects for apps installed in the Metro Start Screen to be capable of supporting Adobe's AIR platform, one way or the other. His comments echoed an emergent theme from Adobe - a clever effort to rework the HTML5 "openness" theme in Flash's favor. By being platform-agnostic, the argument goes, HTML5 should look the other way when any plug-in is being utilized.

Something I said over the weekend before Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim kicked off: It's not about the experience; it's never about the experience. Computing is a process, and what's important about it is what gets done. This week, a big transition process was started, and a lot got done. And in a few cases, we heard what we've been needing to hear for some time: "Message received."

We've probably all worked in organizations where we've been put in charge of projects we believed in with all our hearts and half our salaries, only to see them superseded long before their time was up. We've been in Scott Guthrie's place. Until just last April the champion of Silverlight as a Web app development platform, Guthrie now finds himself in charge of Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform.

Corporate conferences each have their own heroes, and Guthrie is one of Microsoft's most-liked, including at Build 2011 in Anaheim. Not long ago when these conferences' principal products were metaphors, attendees cheered and some even begged for folks like Guthrie, Steven Sinofsky, and a while back, Bob Muglia to take the stage. (Muglia is now Juniper Networks' Executive VP for Software.) Today, it's the soft-spoken, sensible types who lead the show, at a time when the operating system itself is looking more and more like one of Ray Ozzie's "service disruptions:" bold, scalable, and metaphorical.

In a way, Azure was the star of Build 2011 and folks here in Anaheim didn't even really know it. Whatever form the Metro apps delivery system takes in the final shipping version of Windows 8 (with a likely timeframe now of Q1 2013), its most impressive and maybe the most important aspect is the inclusion of apps that learn what functions they can provide to the user from the cloud in real-time, and then manage those functions locally on the user's behalf. Put more simply: adaptive apps.