Sun Microsystems today is announcing JavaFX which will take on Adobe’s Flex/Flash/Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight in the battle for rich internet applications developers.

Since Adobe has a position of strength with designers and Microsoft has a position of strength with desktop application developers, what’s Sun’s position of strength? Easy: mobile.

Remember the cool cell phone speech to text app that I saw a couple of weeks ago? Written on Java. Or, how about Radar.net? Java. And there are plenty of other examples of really great Java apps on cell phones too.

Will this convince Steve Jobs to include JavaFX on the iPhone? That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?

Speaking of which it’s time to go see Jonathan Schwartz again. Interesting how his blog post about today’s announcements includes something that looks a lot like an iPhone, huh?

Yesterday, during his speech at the Forbes shindig I attended, Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer’s funniest remark was when he told us that the “Fear of Google” was so prevelent that it even had a three-letter acronymn: FOG.

Anyway, I’ve been hearing more and more about FOG all weekend as I talk with advertising and marketing executives from some of the world’s biggest companies. Here’s a few examples:

1) Why did the stock market drive shares of Yahoo up so fast on total rumors that Microsoft was buying Yahoo? Easy, we wanted it to happen. “We” being journalists who are living in FOG land. Bloggers who’d like to see Microsoft be interesting again (which is why I linked to it).

2) What will do when Google’s growth slows down? One advertising agency exec says he’s afraid of pricing control Google will be able to have if they continue gobbling up market share and advertising companies like DoubleClick. Have a bad quarter coming up? Raise prices!

3) Google is changing expectations of advertisers. One advertising agency exec told me she’s seeing that more and more advertisers are only willing to pay for “the last click” — she works for an airline, for instance, who wants to see ROI reports on all ads now, so it’s getting harder and harder to do creative advertising (which is where advertising agencies add their value and get their fees) in exchange for “boring” text ads. Online “pay per action” ads are training advertisers that they should be able to track everything about advertising and how well it’s working for them. Of course, as we were talking about this on the bus we rolled by a Coca Cola umbrella. I wonder how well THAT is converting!

Anyway, back to #1. Several people on the boat were hoping that Microsoft would buy Yahoo simply to keep competition going in the advertising market. The perception on the street is that Google is leaving its competitors in the dust and they don’t like that, which is causing them to cheer on Microsoft and Yahoo just so they’ll do something interesting and stay in the game.

Oh, and advertisers want to track everything about you on the Internet. They want to know if you saw a blog about something, and a banner about that, and other stuff about that — how does that all mix into your purchasing behavior. They are looking to Google to give them more answers. I heard more than one brand manager decry that he couldn’t see anything about you other than you clicked on an ad on Google to find his company’s stuff.

Because these folks have so much advertising buying power, watch for Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft, to be fair) to cater to them and give them more data about where you’ve been and what you’ve seen.

Do you have FOG? If so, why?

Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times has a good point. The New York Post really jerked around the market and created a lot of wealth for someone. Who benefitted? Did they benefit from the rumor improperly? Note: I haven’t sold any of my stock recently and I haven’t bought any either. I don’t own Yahoo stock. In fact, I’m soon going to sell my Microsoft stock and not buy any stocks in the technology industry. There’s too much conflict there if I own stocks in the industry. There’s WAY too much “footsie” going on here.

Om Malik and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that the much talked about Microsoft/Yahoo rumors won’t come to fruition and that the talks are off.

I’ll tell ya one thing, though. It sure made for interesting conversation with a Yahoo employee I met tonight. We were starting to draw up where value would be built and where it’d be destroyed. There were a lot of places it would be destroyed and if two guys drinking beer can figure that out in half an hour, I’m sure that caused smarter people than us to put on the brakes. For instance one of Yahoo’s biggest properties is its email service. But that’s one of Microsoft’s biggest properties too (aka Hotmail). Then you look at finance sites. Microsoft is doing pretty well there with Microsoft Money (I met an employee who works there too and he said both Microsoft and Yahoo are way ahead of Google in finance traffic). Then you look at mapping. Again, they are pretty strong competitors there. Search? Who’s search technology would be thrown away? Advertising technology? Both Microsoft and Yahoo are pretty close there. Flickr? Clear value creation in an acquisition cause Microsoft doesn’t have anything like it. Same with Del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, Yahoo Answers, MyBlogLog. Portal? Yahoo is clear winner in brand name, but that’s just cause Microsoft has done an awful job in rebranding everything as “Live.”

So, there would be lots of laid off employees in such a merger and that probably sat heavily with Yahoo’s board cause Microsofties would have been in the drivers seat (even where they shouldn’t be, really).

Where would value have been created? Well, if they could keep their relative market shares in all these places after mashing them together then they could really make a run at Google.

But, it all is talk now that the deal is off (I trust Om, he has killer contacts).

I’m sitting in Dallas waiting for a flight to Cancun. Oh, wait, this isn’t Twitter. Sorry about that.

Anyway, in SFO while waiting in the line to get to American Airlines counter a guy turned around and said “Thanks for doing those Adobe videos.” He was Aaron Pedersen, Interactive Architect at DHAP Digital. He’s working on a bunch of Web sites for Scion all with Adobe’s Flex.

Some things I learned from him:

1) It was the first time he’d heard of me.
2) Found me after Ajaxian linked to my videos.
3) Said my video did more for his understanding of the architecture of Flex/Flash than anything else on the Internet.
4) He’s looking into Silverlight but thinks he’ll stick with Flex for now because of the ubiquity and because it’s something he and his team knows and understands.
5) Is excited that Adobe open sourced Flex.

Disclosure: Adobe sponsors PodTech to do a variety of podcasts, but my show isn’t sponsored by them and my compensation isn’t tied to any sponsorship. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe paid me to either write about, video them, or had prior restraint on any of my work. My interview with Scott Guthrie at Microsoft wasn’t paid for either (PodTech paid all my expenses to go down to Las Vegas).

This is why I love having Seagate as a sponsor. If it weren’t for them I couldn’t do any of this work and they’ve been a dream sponsor.
Either way, I told him that I thought Silverlight is something he should look into because it’s very impressive.

Yahoo is up on rumors that Microsoft is wanting to buy it. Something to ponder as I travel to Mexico with Maryam today. Of course that is getting covered from all angles on TechMeme. I’m speaking at the Forbes Online Brand Management forum. I’m not being paid (they paid my travel expenses, but Maryam’s paying her own way down there). No link blogging or regular blogging until Tuesday (I’m going to a BEA thing on Tuesday in Atlanta, though, so not even sure I’ll be back until Thursday next week — too much traveling in my life).

UPDATE: it’s funny that Microsoft could end up paying a LOT more for Flickr and Del.icio.us than it would have paid if they had bought those when I told Gates to buy those. Sigh.

Someone is working late at night cause a bunch of my videos just got posted by Rocky. I love Rocky. I don’t know what I’d do without him. He’s so much faster and more creative than any other editor I’ve worked with so far. And I had no idea he was a software engineer for something like 15 years before getting sick of that and going back to film school (someone else hired him for me and I didn’t even see his resume before we started working together).

See, we don’t really have a posting schedule for ScobleShow. We just try to ship at least one video a day. Sometimes we do more. Like today.

But there’s some really interesting ones here.

First, don’t miss ConceptShare. I filmed them earlier this week at Mix. This is my favorite app from the Under the Radar Office 2.0 conference that was held recently. Lets you collaborate with designers. Then I have two videos up with Compete.com’s David Cancel, co-founder and CTO. Compete does web traffic analysis for free. So if you want to see how your blog stacks up, go check out Compete but in the meantime check out our interview and the demo that David did.

Oh, and in the ConceptShare video can you recognize SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill? How about Microsoft evangelist Tim Sneath? Or ZDNet blogger Dan Farber? Or Microsoft’s Beth Goza?

In the video you’ll also catch they announced some news: ConceptNation, a community of designers.

Demo of Compete.com:

Disclaimer: my show is sponsored by Seagate. No one else pays to be on my show.

Today I was interviewing Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho. They have a really cool suite of services you can use to collaborate with your coworkers. I am enjoying using several of their applications and Sridhar and Raju Vegesna (he writes Zoho’s blog) showed me a bunch of stuff and think they have some really interesting services that are going to change the way we work. But more on that when I get the video up.

During the interview, though, I asked Sridhar if he worries about Microsoft or Google crushing his 600-employee business. He said he doesn’t worry about such things cause his business has been around for 10 years and he says he’ll always find a way to compete. But in his eyes I saw something that most CEOs didn’t have. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I’d say it’s a deep confidence along with lack of fear that was coming from somewhere I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to pull it out of him on tape, but after the camera was turned off they invited me to Peet’s for coffee and we started talking about our kids. I’m not even sure how the conversation turned that direction, but Sridhar told me his son was autistic and that turned the conversation in a whole new direction.

Maryam’s best friend from high school has an autistic child and I’ve spent some time with them so know the hell they go through. The parents, that is. Maryam’s friend’s kid is five. He doesn’t talk. He is hyper active, but doesn’t have conversations with you like normal kids do. Barely even recognizes that someone new is in the room. Other kids will at least look at you when you come in the room. His parents cry regularly and are different people than when I first met them. Somber. Older. Exhausted.

And it just gets worse from there. If you’ve never met a heavily autistic child you have no idea of the hell these parents are going through. They don’t have social ability to try to please you, which Sridhar told me is an important component in learning ability. They also frequently act out, or do very strange/embarrassing things in public. Because they often otherwise look normal these outbursts can prove especially vexing for parents.

Sridhar, over the next hour, gave me a personal tour of his life and the kinds of things they are trying to do to help their child become a functioning member of society (not likely for many of the worst cases).

He told me some things that blew my mind:

1) The cases of children with autism have gone up about 10 times in the past few decades. About 1 out of 100 children will be autistic now. He believes that something in our environment or vaccinations are causing this increase. Most people have never known an autistic child or seen how difficult raising one could be.
2) He personally believes that something about the vaccinations that we’re giving our kids triggers it, or plays a role. He understands that this is a controversial belief, but he says he noticed a major regression after his son had three vaccinations in one day.
3) Some kids do see improvement. He’s working with doctors around the world and said he’s seen a huge improvement in his son’s case with changes in diet and other treatments.
4) He says the Internet is a lifesaver for parents with autistic kids. Google’s result set for “Autism.” He told me that lots of families keep in touch with each other over YouTube (search for Autism, but be prepared to cry) and that he believes that information shared over the Internet is going to find what is causing this and also help in its cure. He says he and his wife participate in a Yahoo group on the topic that gets hundreds of messages a day.
5) The kids with the worst afflictions will cost millions of dollars each to school and then house over their lifetimes (in school they need almost 1:1 instruction) and many autistic kids will never be able to survive in regular society, so will need to be housed in homes where there’s a care-giver present.
6) Silicon Valley has a very high rate of autism, Sridhar told me, but he says that could be that Silicon Valley attracts parents with autistic children for two reasons. 1) The rate among educated people is higher. 2) Silicon Valley has the best trained professionals to deal with autistic children.

Anyway, early on in this conversation Sridhar turned to me and said something like “now you understand why I’m not worried about Google or Microsoft when I go home at night” and added that when you face something like this in your personal life that life at work seems pretty easy, even when facing challenges that the rest of us would think are pretty scary.

Sridhar also rattled off a list of CEOs and famous technologists who are raising autistic children and says he moved to Palo Alto because the schools there are especially good at working with autistic children.

After watching Maryam’s friend deal with her child I can’t even imagine the difficulties raising a child like this. My hat is off to all those parents who are raising kids like this. You are my heroes. I can’t even begin to understand. Thanks to Sridhar for sharing your story with me. I’m glad I took the time to turn off the camera and get to know you.

To put an underscore on the Silverlight vs. Flash battle, last night there were several Web video startups that presented at the SF New Tech! Live shindig. I think all of them are using Flash. Will Silverlight start to show up? You can watch last night’s proceedings too on Veodia. Funny enough, they aren’t using Flash.

But what caught my eye last night? Kyte.tv. That rocks as a way to interact with other people via your video camera (particularly cool with cell phones). There’s a chat capability — you can email any video into the system and it’s shown immediately. Plus you can talk smack with the community that’s hanging out on your channel. I gotta try this out, but Maryam and I are headed off to Cancun tomorrow.

Right now I’m driving to Zoho in Pleasanton to get a good look at their suite of “Work 2.0″ services.

Adobe and Microsoft are going full force after developers now. It’ll be interesting to see what other services like Kyte.tv come along because of Flash and Silverlight. Those who are arguing for using plain old HTML are missing the point. Kyte.tv is cool and is cool because it’s using Flex 2.0. I don’t see developers building Kyte.tv style sites in plain old HTML.

The top story on TechMeme this morning is that PC World Editor, Harry McCracken, resigned his job yesterday cause his boss wanted to be nicer to advertisers and wanted to kill a story he did on Apple. I like Harry a lot. He was in my living room a few months ago during a debate about OSX vs. Vista.

Anyway, Harry, I’d love to work with you again — your stock just went up due to your editorial stance. IDG’s just went way down.

UPDATE: I just striked out the text above because John Welch is right and I don’t know what really happened. I’ve been reflecting on his words and he’s right that we’re only hearing one side of the story. I know that from my time inside Microsoft that usually the story you see in public isn’t the true story and that only the employee who left the company gets to speak because of fears of getting sued. We know that Harry isn’t working for PC World anymore. But we don’t know the kind of story he wanted to run or hear Colin’s point of view.

Either way, Harry was enjoyable to work with before and I’d love to work with him again.