Richard MacManus, Universal Canvas – In the Beginning…:

But lets go back to the beginning, or at least the beginning of when the term ‘Universal Canvas’ started to be bandied about by Microsoft as part of its .NET push. The 2000 white paper I referred to above described how “Microsoft .NET will take computing and communications far beyond the one-way Web to a rich, collaborative, interactive environment”. The web browser was seen as a key component to this vision. In 2000 the web browser was only a “glorified read-only dumb terminal”, but Microsoft’s goal was to provide a “unified browsing, editing and authoring environment”.

However fast forward to 2003 and the web browser is less prevalant in the .NET vision. So what’s the focal point for the Universal Canvas now? Well a clue or two was given in a 2002 InfoWorld interview with Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes. […] And you can see that, rather than the universal canvas being built around the web browser, it is now an Office concept…at least for Microsoft.