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."

Comments

Questions the article doesn't answer

[Anonymous Coward]

• What happens to passport?

  Microsoft was going to open up passport authentication to third-party ID servers via passport, right? Or am i just confused about that? Is that not happening anymore?

  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?

• The way i understood it, Hailstorm was a relatively decentralized technology as designed and didn't really DEPEND on microsoft being there to hold it all together. Right? 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?
• Was GNOME MONO planning on implementing hailstorm as part of their .net workalike? Are they still going to?

For once, perhaps marketing was a good thing?

[ShaunC]

>It seems the companies didn't like having a middleman between them and the consumers

Gee, who'd have guessed. Microsoft, the company who's trying to incorporate every possible end-user application into their OS (thus killing the middleware, shareware, and even some commercial software industries) didn't see this coming? They couldn't imagine that other companies might have the same interests in mind? Aside from the obvious consumer objections, it should have been obvious to Microsoft from the get-go that other companies aren't going to trust them to keep track of userdata.

CBDTPA universally rejected and Hailstorm bites the dust. I have to say, today was a good day.

-s

Re:.Net != "Hailstorm"

[The Raven]

Microsoft has pretty consistently touted the networked XML web services part of the .NET framework as the 'best part'. Which I think is complete bullshit. The 'best part' about .NET is the fact that it is compiled, managed, sandboxed code with a truly awesome set of tools to play with. Improved data management, almost every object in it is serializable (you can save it to the HD in text or binary format, and reload it later, built in, no extra coding).

There are a lot of reasons to like .NET... in fact, the only reason I know of NOT to like .NET is the usual 'Windows Only' bullshit. But it's a MS product... that's a given.

Re:.Net != "Hailstorm"

[Dephex Twin]

There are a lot of reasons to like .NET... in fact, the only reason I know of NOT to like .NET is the usual 'Windows Only' bullshit. But it's a MS product... that's a given.

Well, as a Mac user for over 10 years, I'd rather not have .NET overtaking the market., and having to deal with another Windows-only situation.

(I submitted the article, BTW.)

Maybe that clarifies a bit...

mark

.NET is actually pretty sweet

[VFVTHUNTER]

I had used Linux and FreeBSD excusively for about two years - I even once posted a (rejected) Ask Slashdot question entitled "Why Windows," arguing that with the multimedia (mplayer) and browser (pick konq/galeon) support available in Linux, that no one needed Windows.

My viewpoint has changed radically. I have an XP box now - it's actually a pretty stable OS. And .NET delivers on all the promises that Sun had made of Java. (M$ has beaten them - intsead of "write once, run anywhere," .NET offers "compile once, run anywhere.")

I still use Linux/Apache/MySQL for all of my servers - and with SQL 2000 at $20,000 per processor that won't change anytime soon - but Windows has gotten more stable. Linus once said that he started Linux because he wanted software that didn't stink...win3.1, win95, and win98 all stink, but 2K and XP are actually pretty nice.

I will probably switch back over to an all OSS setup when Miguel et al finish Mono. That's gonna be sweet, too - imagine the day when you can compile an executable (not java bytecode) on a {Windows, Linux} box and then run that executable on a {Linux, Windows} box.

That's the nice thing about .NET - M$ has actually embraced industry standards. ASP.NET can be accessed from any client provided you have an HTTP connection. That's the only requirement. I sitll support the paranoid people, because there is always the chance that M$ will extend and extinguish what it has embraced, but with them having submitted everything to ECMA, that's really an outside worry.

Wither the Liberty Alliance?

[MagikSlinger]

So now that their competition has gone away, what happens to the Liberty Alliance? Will they stick together, or each go their separate ways creating their own separate identity database schemes?

This alternative may be worse

[yardbird]

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.

IOW, a common code base with the typical MS attention to security, but maintained by thousands of clueless sysadmins rather than by a single company who at least might see fit to install updates. So instead of a single point of failure, you suddenly have hundreds. Fun!

Re:Cheers! They realized it was doomed from start.

[MsGeek]

I can say though... EVERYONE that I know with an MCSE and/or works at a MCSP (MS Cert Solutions Provider) was in support of the Hailstorm idea.

Uh...not every MCSE out there.

I was, to be frank, worried about its implications for security. Having Microsoft guard the keys to my bank account is like having the fox guard the hen house.

Nice to see it go. Now .NET can stand or fall on its own merits, not on privacy concerns.

Re:Dumb question for the /. editors....

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

My question is this: if Slashdot editors really feel this way, then why is Slashdot advertizing Visual Studio .NET in its banner ads?

Um, because -- as with most news sources -- advertising is kept separate from editorial content?

Re:nope

[FaithAndReason]

drfrank is correct - the base pay was increased to 65% of the (local prevailing) industry wage, partly to compensate for the huge loss in value of the options. There was also a 25% additional bonus paid to their employees in Silicon Valley, but that has since been scaled back (now that they're not losing their Bay Area employees to dot-coms.)

Re:Microsoft and the future

[JabberWokky]

I'm not so sure about this. If there's one thing that we can be sure about, it's that MS is persistant to levels no other business can finance. They've launched programs and fallen on their face more times than most companies could ever hope to afford. Many would say that they've finally gotten Windows right, and it only took them 15 years.

I'm sure MS will get the X-Box right, even if it takes another 15 years, because when they do get it right, they'll have it all. Why bother with Windows on PC's when they can put everything; game console, DVD player, PC, all in one box that they get the revenues from?

It's interesting because it's that sort of slow persistance that makes open source work. Amid dozens of half assed and abortive projects rises one or a few really good solutions. The surprising thing is not that it works, but that it works so fast. Microsoft has a phenominally large but bounded budget. Open source has a budget bounded only by the time and people willing to give a hand. And since there's always a new class of college students thinking they can revolutionise the world, that's a very renewable resource. Now that companies like IBM are contributing, aware that this is about the only way to see MS dethroned, it's starting to polarize the IT world.

Who has a larger budget - Microsoft, or the rest of the industry, including volunteers working for the experience?

--
Evan