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The Vanishing HailStorm
ElitusPrime writes ".NET My Services, Microsoft Corp's high-profile set of XML web services postponed eight months ago, seems to have dropped off the company's 2003 roadmap. .NET My Services, once codenamed Hailstorm, was to comprise 14 services including an electronic online address book and voice mail inbox and was once trumpeted as the vanguard of a .NET web services revolution by the company."
Decentralization of critical data is key to security, robustness, scalability, ..., etc.
Translation: Putting all of one's eggs into one basket is not a smart thing to do.
I can't believe that people are even using Microsoft's Passport. I guess by making it a necessity in order to use certain MSN Web services like Hotmail, this was the only way they figured they could attract customers.
Why would I want to store all vital information of mine (SS#, credit card #, name, address, phone, email, etc.) on one sketchy server up in Redmond, WA?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Please, please, please! Do not use "comprise" unless you know how to use it! comprise != is composed of !!!
Example sentence:
14 elements comprise the whole.
which means:
The whole is composed of 14 elements.
I can take spelling errors, but comprise is not a commonly used word, and using it improperly just says you know the word vaguely and would like to show off your "literacy".
j
I remember in 1995, when the Internet was just starting to bud in the commercial world, MS wanted to kill it.
I went to some Microsoft roadshow in Indianapolis, and they were touting the capabilities of the Microsoft Network, and how everything that was possible on the Internet, was possible on MSN, only better.
It was amusing to some guy in an MS golf shirt demonstrate things such as web browsing, IRC, and FTP and how they would better be served in an MS-only environment.
A year or so later, they abandoned the kill the Internet strategy, and started up their "embrace and extend" policy.
In short, MS got it's ass kicked. They quickly swept that defeat under the rug, and you rarely ever hear about it, which is I'm sure what will happen with this defeat.
I spoke with some of the top guys at Passport who were obviously heavily involved with Hailstorm at Digital ID World 2002 in Denver. They assured me Hailstorm was very much alive, but it had turned into a far bigger project than they had thought. In particular, I remember one guy saying something to the effect of "Well, my conscious is clean, I told Bill 2 years was unreasonable, but did he listen? Of course not". Words pretty close to that.
It may have been a red herring, but I seriously doubt it. I for one don't think Hailstorm has gone - just forgotten, at least for now.
The passport stuff is even worst then that.
Microsoft recently released a new game Asheron's Call 2. The only code developed by microsoft in what is otherwise a very excellent game, is the passport billing and authentication system. That is major problem with the game and is causing alot of problems.
First it is limited to worked with credit card companies from only 8 countries. This may of been planned from the DRM side.
Second it has problems with being up, so once you are in the game it is ok, but sometimes you have problems getting authenticated by passport and the microsoft servers. Sometimes it is because the servers are down, othertimes it seems to not find peoples authentication for the first attempt.
Third say you cancel in the middle of a pay period, from that point on the passport system drops your authorization. So no playing until your payment period runs out. On the bright side of this they do warn you about this.
Its difficult to find unbiased comparissons as I am sure you have seen from the flame wars that errupt every time the subject comes up. You can try this Web Services for a review of web services or this Smackdown for a synopsis of the recent petstore furore or check out GotDotNet for general stuff about .NET
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The same with product activation, which was touted for win2k.
Actually, it was Office 2000 that was the first (limited) testbed for product activation.
Maybe their technique for these less palatable aspects of their business is to announce, allow the fuss to die down, and then introduce it when it has become 'old news'.
Suggest you track down a copy of 'Barbarians Led By Bill Gates' [Edstrom & Eller, 1998] for the history of Microsoft's history of trying to foster new technologies onto an unknowing (and sometimes uncaring) world.
Or maybe I'm crediting them with too much intelligence.
They're not lacking intelligence, its sense and sensitivity that they have a shortage of, judging by some of their efforts...
-MT.
Hailstorm might be forgotten, but much of the underlying services are still there. PassPost lives on and much of the hailstorm services has been renamed .Net Alerts.
http://www.microsoft.com/netservices/alerts/defaul t.asp .Alert is a very good idea - something that is completely missing in aol or liberty alliance. It is free for users, but if you want to sent messages it is going to cost you (a LOT-10.000$ for MS Passport and approx .10 $/user per month)
Microsoft announced that they were scrapping / postponing this due to a lack of interest from customers. Basically, people thought (correctly) that it was a stupid idea. A few years back, Microsoft tried selling Office as an online ASP Service over the web. It was a stupid idea and no one used it. Clearly they saw this was going to be the same thing.
None of this is exactly a Red Herring -- Microsoft follows a pattern of announcing some far reaching plan, then seeing who responds / complains and then adjusting / cancelling before they actually make any concrete plans (or most likely write a line of code).
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Though this is authored by microsoft, I felt that it was fairly well done, overall a genuinely balanced comparison.