Microsoft changes their orchestration tune

Did anybody else catch this? Over the past three weeks, there were two announcements that indicate a rather large shift in how Microsoft view's the role of service orchestration:

• Moving the orchestration server runtime from BizTalk into Longhorn Server
• BizTalk will not merge into Jupiter

Im my mind, this is a rather drastic movement that highlights the important role service orchestration is going to play for future application development. Rather than being sold as part of a high-end eCommerce bundle, orchestration is moving into the OS, i.e. as deep as it gets into the commodity space.

There was a hint at PDC that something is in the works... I wish it would come sooner, but I guess Microsoft has to recoup some of the investment into 1.8 million lines of C# code for BizTalk Server 2004 (according to ScottWoo) before making it part of the Windows revenue stream.