Is BizTalk out of biz?

When you look at the stuff announced at this years PDC, like Azure and the underlying Microsoft.NET Service Bus we might doubt that BizTalk will continue to exist as a stand-alone product. We already saw WF had an overlap with the Orchestration capabilities of BizTalk and WCF sort-of depricates its messaging engine (unless you use the WCF Adapters). It turns out that even at the project code-name level BizTalk had to step aside. A project recently codenamed "Biztalk Serivces" has now been renamed to "Microsoft.NET Service Bus".

Take a look at this session for some insight:

http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/BB38.wmv

A lot of the standard Biztalk solution patterns are covered here (messaging, pub-sub, event driven etc.). This makes me question why there are still plans to release the ESB Guidance 2.0 for Biztalk (assuming it is indeed the successor to the previous open-source initiative). What is the story behind the Biztalk roadmap?

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx

My guess is that BizTalk will be targeting a smaller problem domain in the future. The domain of making legacy application talk to eachother using adapters. It will be leaving all the wide-scale messaging and "in the cloud" integration to Azure. One of the features not natively supported by these new concepts is message transformations (although WF will be supporting this in the near future, as you will hear at the end of the PDC session recording mentioned above). When you combine this with the enormous amount of legacy system adapters for BizTalk we might conclude the answer to this posts question is NO, ...al least for now...

Google data mining

The days internet was there for geeks and techies only are long gone now. Google trends show us clearly how well the non-tech world has embrached this fantasic "application" (as my relatives tend to describe it). The following charts show us that the average internet user's interests change gradually over time (the past 5 years):

Source: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=5&cmpt=q

Computer & Electronics searches:

Entertainment oriented searches:

The interest in sports on the internet shows a very clear pattern. Clearly this pattern is related to the interval between the big sport events (seems to be 2 years):

Google insights can tell us more about ourselves than we think. The fact that internet advertising is coupled to social trends leads to even more clear patterns of hypes (short peaks), and long-term (gradual) change .