Something big happened last week, the birth of a new concept: the Internet Service Bus, or as Microsoft Connected Systems division has christened it, BizTalk Services. Read, for example, Dennis Pilarinos on what this is, and Clemens Vasters on why it's important.
Besides being an exteremely interesting initiative because of what it is, I find the choice of name quite intriguing also... is this the first public evidence of a Redmond strategy to morph BizTalk from a product to a brand; from a messaging application platform to a marketing smorgasbord of services and tools for connecting distributed systems?
I think it's quite likely: the advent of WCF and WF has always appeared to me as the writing on the wall for BizTalk as a single monolithic product, which the absorption of the BizTalk product group into the CSD seemed to confirm.