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Microsoft Gives Up on Hailstorm
Dephex Twin writes "According to a NYTimes article: due to lack of 3rd-party support for Microsoft's "Persona" (originally codenamed "Hailstorm"), the company has been forced to dump the project. It seems the companies didn't like having a middleman between them and the consumers. As a person worried about the future with .NET, this is a bit of a relief."
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/n/net/net-1.html
.NET actual is and is not. The article gives a nice broad technical overview.
For those that are interested in learning what
This isn't exactly the first time Microsoft has chosen to scrap a project that has been so heavily advertised, but it's definitely one of the most prestigious ones they have cancelled.
.NET service that "authenticates users, provides the ability to send alerts, and stores personal information, including contacts, e-mail, calendar, profile, lists, electronic wallet, physical location, document stores, application settings, favorite Web sites, devices owned, and preferences for receiving alerts." (from Microsoft)
.NET is crucial to get penetration on the Big Market, i.e. mission critical business application software.
.NET's, showing off its capabilities. Now it's going to be interesting to see how the industry acceptance for .NET evolves.
Hailstorm/Persona was supposed to be a
I think the key problem for Microsoft is the following (from the article:) "They ran into the reality that many companies don't want any company between them and their customers,"
Bill and Steve are probably a bit surprised, not used to having people say No to them, especially not the big companies that they have started to court now that they have a consumer market monopoly.
Hailstorm/Persona was seen by many as a reference implementation of
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's the article text:
.Net strategy. It was intended to permit an individual to keep an online persona independent of his or her desktop computer, supposedly safely stored as part of a vast data repository where there could be easy access to it from any point on the Internet.
.Net software to leverage its brand into a broad range of service businesses.
.Net consultant, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. Microsoft was unable to persuade either consumer companies or software developers that it had solved all of the privacy and security issues raised by the prospect of keeping personal information in a centralized repository, he said.
.Net operating system.
April 11, 2002
Microsoft Has Shelved Its Internet 'Persona' Service
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, April 10 -- Microsoft (news/quote ) has quietly shelved a consumer information service that was once planned as the centerpiece of the company's foray into the market for tightly linked Web services.
The service, originally code-named Hailstorm and later renamed My Services, was to be the clearest example of the company's ambitious
At the time of the introduction of My Services, Microsoft also proclaimed that it would have a set of prominent partners in areas like finance and travel for the My Services system. However, according to both industry consultants and Microsoft partners, after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.
Industry executives said the caution displayed by consumer giants like American Express (news/quote) and Citigroup (news/quote ) illuminated a bitter tug of war being fought over consumer information by some of the largest financial and information companies.
"They ran into the reality that many companies don't want any company between them and their customers," said David Smith, vice president for Internet services at the Gartner Group (news/quote), a computer industry consulting and research firm.
The lack of interest also indicates that in a variety of industries outside the desktop computer business there remain significant concerns about Microsoft's potential to use its personal computer monopoly and its
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An early signal that the My Services idea was in trouble came last fall at Microsoft's annual developer's conference, attended by more than 6,000 programmers. The sessions on My Services were poorly attended, an attendee said.
"There was incredible customer resistance," said a Microsoft
Microsoft executives acknowledged the shift in strategy and said the company was still contemplating how it would bring out a revised version of the My Services technology. The decision resulted in a relocation of several dozen programmers in December from a consumer products development group run by Robert Muglia to the company's operating systems division.
"We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for platform strategy.
He said part of the decision to back away from a consumer version of My Services was based on industry concerns about who was going to manage customer data. The issue, he asserted, was more of a sticking point within the industry, rather than among consumers.
"We heard a lot of concern about that point from competitors in the industry but very little from our users," he said.
Microsoft is now considering selling My Services to corporations in a traditional package form, rather than as a service. The companies would maintain the data for their own users.
"Frankly selling this stuff to people who build large data centers with our software is not a bad model," Mr. Fitzgerald said.
Microsoft first introduced the Hailstorm services idea at a news conference at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., in March 2001. At the time, the technology received endorsements from a handful of corporations including American Express, Expedia (news/quote), eBay (news/quote), Click Commerce (news/quote) and Groove Networks.
At the time of the announcement, Microsoft described Hailstorm as a way for a consumer to have a consistent set of services, like e-mail, contacts, a calendar and an electronic "wallet" -- whether sitting at a desk or traveling and using a wireless personal digital assistant.
"Microsoft's `Hailstorm' technologies open exciting new opportunities for us to use the Web in ways never thought of before, helping us to continue to deliver service that is truly unmatched in the industry," Glen Salow, the chief information officer of American Express, said at the time in a statement.
More recently, however, American Express officials have told computer industry executives that they remain concerned about being displaced by Microsoft's brand in such a partnership.
A company spokesman said in a telephone interview today that American Express had intended to endorse the broader notion of integrated Internet services last March, not My Services specifically. He said he did not know if the company had discussions with Microsoft about becoming a My Services repository.
Several industry consultants who work with Microsoft said that the company was now planning to deploy My Services as a software product for corporate computer users some time next year, after the company introduces its
"Enterprise customers were telling Microsoft, `We like this idea but we don't want to be part of this huge public database,' " said Matt Rosoff, an analyst who follows the company at Directions on Microsoft, a market research firm in Kirkland, Wash.
When it was introduced, the Hailstorm plan quickly became a lightning rod for privacy advocates who saw dangers in concentrating vast amounts of personal information in a single repository.
Last fall a coalition of privacy groups complained in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission about the potential risks inherent in Microsoft's collecting personal information from and about several hundred million personal computer users.
My Services also created thorny privacy issues for Microsoft in Europe, because of restrictions on transborder data transfers there. Microsoft has not resolved how personal information stored in one country can be easily transmitted internationally.
This is not an "inopportune" time; this is exactly the time when MS needs to expand into other businesses. (See my other post to this article.) Desktop OS revenues are flat; nobody seems in any hurry to upgrade Office versions; and MSN TV hasn't done very well. They need to find something to satisfy their legal responsibility to their shareholders (note that this primarily still means Bill & Steve & Jim.)
As for the XBox: you're absolutely right that it's an "investment for the future", but perhaps not in the way you meant. The XBox's real purpose is clearly visible if you dig a bit deeper into their discussions with ISVs (i.e. game developers). It's called XBox.NET, in other words, a $10 or $20/month online gaming subscription service. The XBox is clearly targeted to the 18-35 crowd, plus it's the only console that currently ships with an ethernet port built-in.
That's where MS plans to make its money: if it sells you one game (e.g. Halo) plus 6 months of XBOX.NET at say $20/month, they make back that $125 subsidy for the hardware, then even if they never sell you another game!
And don't expect them to run out of money any time soon. Right now, they anticipate losing about $2,000,000,000 before they start breaking even on the XBox, but they have about $37,000,000,000 in the bank. According to SteveB, even with 40,000 employees (up from 30,000 just 2 years ago), they have enough money in the bank to run the company another 5 YEARS without another dime of revenue...
Further, since MS pays its employees less than the industry average and compensate with employee stock options, MS has to keep its stock value rising at a high rate. Slow expansion or a mostly constant stock value won't do well. The Motley Fool had something on this.
and.... after the Enron/Anderson debacle, there is talk of changing accounting rules vis a vis options. Companies would have to book options as expenses (strike price vs actual cost IIRC)
I think Microsoft's (and a lot of OTHER companies for that matter) 'profits' would evaporate rather quickly under this scenario. Potentially VERY ugly.
MAB
Is microsoft abandoning their drive to make Passport the authentication mechanism for *everything*, Starbucks and such, or are they just going to drop the pretense of making it an open system?
.NET MyServices (aka Hailstorm). Passport is an authentication mechanism while .NET MyServices was supposed to be a centralized repository of user information (calendar, preferences, inbox, contacts, bookmarks, etc) which could be queried by various vendors who would receive restricted access to the data based on the user's settings.
.NET MyServices like an inbox, contacts, calendar etc.
.net workalike? Are they still going to?
Passport was a seperate initiative from
Is it possible for people to take the hailstorm protocol, if they so desire, and set up an independent, decentralized hailstorm network that just happens to not be affiliated at all with microsoft?
There are a couple of things to consider here. The first being whether there are any intellectual property(IP) issues, I have no idea about this but wouldn't advice anyone to start something like that without at first ensuring there aren't any patents or anything like that being violated. The second thing is exactly how one would use the technology. Personally when I first saw a Hailstorm presentation last summer I kept on thinking that it may face difficulty in gaining widespread acceptance for exactly the same reasons listed in the article; there was no justification for vendors to give up so much control to user information to a third party. One example touted was the ability to move music preferences from website to website but the question never asked is why Amazon.com [for example] would make it easier for users to grab all their painstakingly entered personal preferences and music ratings to CDNow.com or some other online site. I remember emailing the presenter about my thoughts but couldn't follow up since it happened close to the end of my internship. However, it may work within a closed environment like a corporate intranet but then again MSFT already has Exchange which has a lot of the important functionality that would be provided by
Was GNOME MONO planning on implementing hailstorm as part of their
Gnome is not related to Mono. Miguel De Icaza may have founded both but he no longer maintains any packages for Gnome nor does he do much (if any) active development but instead spends most of his energy on Mono.
As for your question, Mono is not interested in Passport or Hailstorm and went as far as creating a page about it because people kept on getting misconceptions about it.
Disclaimer:This post is my opinion and does not reflect the views, opinions, intentions or strategies of my employer.