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."

Comments

I knew the following before taking any CS courses

[ekrout]

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?

MS versus the world

[tokki]

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.

Slow down!

[IamTheRealMike]

Don't go so fast.

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.

Problem was no customers

[Codex The Sloth]

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).