Adam Bosworth left Microsoft, founded Crossgain, and is now Chief Architect at BEA. He's just started up his blog and is already in the thick of it. FWIW, I agree that disconnected or semi-connected applications are going to become more common. If you've read the recent articles by Tim O'Reilly and Ray Ozzie, you won't be surprised at this. I do think that both Adam and Tim Bray are not quite on in their assessment of "rich clients". But I don't think of it in terms of UI complexity / simplicity or the weight of the applications. I think that its interesting for people to mix data that they get via the network with data that they have on their local machine. The problem with the browser isn't necessarily that the UI is not rich, it's that its mostly a world unto itself. What we need next is a way to break down the wall between data that we got from the network and local data. And that's why offline is important.

In any case, I'm glad to see Adam on line, he's a deep thinker. I personally owe him a debt that he probably knows nothing about, since we've never met. Back in 1998 when I was working at IBM, and Adam was at Microsoft, we both attended an IBM internal XML summit being held at the IBM Almaden Research center. I was there because the group that I was in was about to start working on XML. Adam was there to talk about XML. I was shocked as he stood up and proceeded to tell the IBM folks exactly what they needed to do in order to capitalize on XML. He was right, and the technical arguments and vision that he set out in his presentation played a big role in my getting excited about our assignment to work on XML. That led to our work on XML4J, and subsequently Xerces-J, which led to my involvement with the ASF. So thanks Adam!