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Gates Embraces Web Service Interoperability
djh101010 writes "In a CNN article which looks more like something out of The Onion, Bill Gates expresses his interest in participating in interoperability with rival technologies, through common standards. Specifically mentioned are IBM's WebSphere, and Linux. 'We're being as inclusive as we can,' Gates said of Microsoft's role in the cross-platform project. 'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
We all know how Gates "embraced" XML for Office 11...
..When I finally own/crush Linux, I want to talk to it..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
I mean this seriously made me think of 99. Obligatory /. .com business plan?
1. Create interoperable standards so users can migrate from one OS to another without rewriting code
2. ????
3. Profit!
Except I have a strong suspicion that number 2 is:
2. Erode competitions' standing in marketplace and watch customers gradually migrate to your software, because migration is no longer a hassle
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Isn't this like a bear "playing" with a couple of salmon in a river? Somehow I doubt that Goliath (Microsoft) really wants to play fair...at this point I welcome all conspiracy theory experts to bring forward explanations :-)
This isn't the first time seemingly good things has been announced which dissapointed later. I'll rejoice when I see some positive results.
It seems to me that this could be Microsoft's new strategy against the open source world.
Embrace them, incorporate ideas, etc, giving them "all the advantages of linux".
Well, that's what it'll say on the new adverts.
Gates said the Redmond, Washington-based company's work toward Web services standards would be "royalty free." That remark led to questions from the audience, which wanted to make sure Gates hadn't misstated the deviation from the company's royalty-based software sales model.
Royalty free? Not if SCO can do something about that. What I found a bit odd, would be his comments on standards: "Standards are always a give-to-get bargain," he said. Standards are also done on behalf of everyone for everyone in order to make services work the right way. It's the only way to get products working with eatch other. So for one, he is not obligated to participate in any standards, but at the same time he is as if he doesn't, his products might not perform well under other vendors' products. So in essence whether he likes it or not, he is obligated if he wants to stay in the game and make money. As for the Netscape mention, personally I don't see Netscape as being around too long as a browser considering Netscape's parent AOL recently signed a deal with Microsoft. Just my two coppers...
MoFscker
In other words, they are giving so they can get something which in the end they can use to further lock out other applications and companies from being compatible.
A famous quote comes to mind:
"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." --Virgil
Be curious to find out how they will try to spin this to their advantage while disadvantaging everyone else.
A PR move, nothing more, nothing less.
That article opens with a quip about Gates embracing Linux, Netscape and royalty-free software but the article only states that they'll help develop a royalty free "Web services standard". Wow, big deal. Where's all the "loving" the headline promises???
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Embrace, extend, close.
Become the standard, close out the competition.
-=sig=-
Services for Unix
Microsoft is most likely finding a gateway between their technology and everyone else's to create a migration path towards MS products. Once everyone has flocked over, the usual grab-you-by-the-balls policies apply. What I think they're missing is that the technology works the other way too. You can use this interoperability to get off the MS train. Look at Services for Unix... it created a path that goes both ways between *NIX and MS. MS probably designed it as a one-way tunnel, but in return we got a pathway to migrate off.
Conspiracy theorize all you want to, but MS may have just handed linux the keys to the desktop.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
IBM should have learned from OS/2 about partnering with Microsoft. Currently they are very pro Java , for example take a look at their developer website. .NET suite.
Since IBM does not have a decent web/app server they probably are trying to get a foot in the door for their
I have so far understood their "embrace" part. But what I don't get is where does the "annihilate" part come in? By standardising the XML standards Java also benefits, right? So how does M$ plan to screw Java and IBM
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Why do you assume Bill Gates et al. is making the same mistake that a lot of other businesses make? For example, the RIAA member companies and several others. Everybody says, "Jeez, these business people are dumb and are fighting the inevitable."
What if Microsoft realized two things:
- Linux isn't going away.
- You get free shit from them.
Effectively meaning that they can start to actually embrace and integrate services, and actually expand and mutate their business model based on the economy and world, rather than what everybody perceives as their business model.I was chatting with a SCORE member, and he said that a true business plan should be a living entity that evolves with the world around it. Why is it so hard to believe that the most successful software company doesn't heed that advice?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I mean, come on, think about it.... One of the big problems with every major dotcom in the last few years is the fact that none of them could escape the fact that they were one of a ton of small fish in a big pong. Just go to google and type in a search for "Operating System", Windows and Microsoft aren't even on the radar.
.NET.... Internet Explorer is nothing more than a tool for the vast majority of users, something to help them get to websites that they want to go and facilitate interactions there. Passport Wallets did not become a de facto internet must-have.... Too many people don't shop on the web, spammers have trained the vast majority of internet users not to instinctively trust anyone (even Verisign, a _trust_ company, betrayed the trust of people with other domain registars with sleazy marketing tactics).... I recon Microsoft sees strength in themselves only by trying to keep their software updated and operating as people expect it to operate, along with traditional software sales, because their services from Passport to Hotmail to MSN probably don't account for anything more than a pittance.
If this stuff (what little there is) is true, this probably is just extends what Gates has known for a while, in spite of
Just my opinion.
Sun's Java fiasco, or Microsoft's fiasco?
You have to wonder if this announcement has something to do with Sun recently releasing its Java-based office stack. Also, factor in Steve Ballmer's recent comments on the state of MS's security problems, Apple (lot's of innovation MS can copy, but they're not taking market share), and open source.
Perhaps MS has decided its time to "embrace" Linux, attempt to "extend" it with proprietary MS code, and then litigate the hell out of the GPL to make the resulting product proprietary intellectual property.
It would be a huge gamble, particularly if the GPL holds up in court. But MS could drain a lot of money and resources out of the open source movement even if they lose, perhaps enough even to win the war despite losing the battle.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid and Mr. Gates and Company really have decided that they've made enough money, dominated enough markets, and foisted enough FUD on the world and it's time to contribute all their code to the public domain.
Yeah, right.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
I know this redundant. But, I have to say it:
Microsoft has said this before, and the results have always been bad for developers and consumers (for example the Java and XML debacle).
I don't mind Microsoft using existing standards; I do violently oppose them guiding the course of standards, because they have been shown to be a bad steward for any public standard they get their hands on.
I would be so bold as to argue that it is not out of hubris that they are as they are, as much as from greed.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"Breaking Windows" by David Bank?
The central premise in this book is Bill Gates' philosophy of product development. Although the author presents it as a pragmatic, thought-out business plan that evolved from Bill Gates' examination of the market, to me it always came across as a response to basic insecurities that exposed more of Bill's personality flaws than any understanding of the market.
It goes like this: it doesn't matter how good the product is; it doesn't matter how well a product works; customers are fickle and will switch software at the drop of a hat. Therefore, the only way to keep customers is to 'lock them in', to leverage Office to increase Windows share and Windows to increase Office share by continually tying them together and forcing one to require the other. I am paraphrasing and working from memory, read the book.
My points are:
1. the basic business philosophy of Microsoft is so deeply rooted in the insecurities of it's founder and the founder is still in control
2. the whole idea of "open" standards is completely contrary to the concepts of "lock-in" that has worked so well for Microsoft up to this point
that this DOES sound like something from an alternate universe as one poster here has noted and that this has about as much chance of being even partially true as a snowball's chance in hell.
How much of that gift is earmarked to buy Microsoft products? If the money is used to buy computers, will other OSes be allowed to be installed?
I gift with these restrictions isn't a gift at all, it's a type of marketing...
Because one developer says that MS is using XML standards correctly, does this mean that MS will actually keep it's formats open and backwards compatible?
Keep in mind it's the MS developement team that have created the file format mess in the past that is so horrid that entire countries are moving away from your closed formats. I can't even send an word 2000 doc to my father in-law who has OfficeXP with out it getting screwed up.
Even if what you say is 100% accurate, and MS delivers a compatible format that works with say, OpenOffice and Start Office, you have absoultely _NO_ gurantees that MS will not change the file format on the next upgrade and at that point turn the data to a completely proprietary form that is accessible only to the next upgrade of office.
Very few people in their right minds will trust MS anymore, and for good reasons.
If you want to convince people that Microsoft is becoming more open, you have a lot of work ahead of you learning how to distribute standards, sample implementations, and other documentation:
Until you start distributing stuff so that people can actually download and use it without Microsoft products and without signing their life away, all that talk of embracing open standards is just meaningless fluff.
Wow, got a problem with this business practice, huh? Well, can you name any major software company that has "embraced" standards, without extending them? Not Sun. Not Netscape. Not IBM. Maybe some Linux company?
I'm not defending the practice, just pointing out that it's considered legitimate by the software community at large, and used by some of the largest names in the industry. And that includes, but doesn't consist only of, Microsoft.
You mean how Microsoft shipped XML vocabularies compliant to the W3C XML 1.0 recommendation....
And how the XML format is only supported with the most expensive version of Office. If someone's spending $800+ on an MS Office, you can be pretty sure they're not looking at alternatives, so you don't need to worry about losing them as a customer through support for XML. The Office Standard customers, who might want to spend $100 on StarOffice, rather than $300 on MS Office, you don't give XML formats to, because they might realize they only need one copy of MS Office, and the rest of their computers can use StarOffice or OpenOffice.
One more thing, since you claim to work for Microsoft:
Why is microsoft.com so damned hard to navigate, and why does the site search engine suck so much?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Please name one vendor other than Microsoft that has announced that their product will be able to read and write Microsoft Word 11 documents.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm sure Bill Gates can be a dab hand at making fawning concilliatory noises too, but while he and his cohorts are doing their best to stifle open standards, open source with their every deed, it all rings extremely hollow.
(Before you mod me down, at least read half the comment)
Gates has realized that Microsoft cannot hold the crown of the software world forever. It's great at competing against companies that it can buy out or undercut, but it can't do either of those to Linux. IBM lost their crown when it failed to realize the PC, and the software running on it, were the new champs of the computing business. Ironically, I think this is the first step in Microsoft converting from a software company to a services company. It's pretty hard to make money on software if some geeks are giving it away for free.
The decade of windows is about to close, it became the best OS for the average (non-programmer) user when Win 95 was released, and before that Macintosh had their decade. Linux's decade hasn't started yet, but Windows only has a few years left, and Bill realizes that. If you look at the way the economy is turning, you can see that while the pure programming jobs may go overseas, services can't. Many companies are already using the "give the software away, charge for services" model of doing business (actually, the company I work for is selling the software, services, and a required maintainance contract - I'm feeling pretty safe), and are surviving just fine.
Not that Microsoft hasn't turned every one of these initiatives in the past into either an "embrace-and-extend" or "embrace-and-block" (by being one of the founders and then never giving final approval to the standard) strategy. Maybe they'll go through with this one this time, but expect to see Microsoft make an about-face on software in the next ten years like they did with their position on the internet back in '97. It's just a matter of time.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
The strategy of the DotGNU project is to re-use a good number of existing Free Software libs (written in C) and compile them for .NET - again since those libs are old, they're safe from being affected by any .NET patents.
Even assuming this makes sense technically (see below), surely if you no longer care about portability between Dotnet and dotGNU, you've just lost the main justification for the dotGNU project?
If I have developed a Dotnet app, but I can't compile it on dotGNU because it calls Windows Forms, or ASP.NET or ADO.NET... why on earth should I care that, if I could compile it, the generated bytecodes would be the same instruction set as found on Windows? By definition, there cannot be any value for me to have portability at the bytecode level if it is missing at the application level. And, if I do go as far as changing every non-core API call in my app, I'm hardly going to care much if the bytecode is different - I have to maintain and generate two versions anyway.
Without portability, it seems positively perverse to seek to extend the influence of Microsoft technologies on Linux when there are already very well established equivalents (Java, Python, Parrot). Java-on-Linux investments alone must total something in the order of billions of dollars per year, judging by the number of large organizations doing rollouts of this type - I'd guess that currently Java is the single biggest factor pushing Linux into commercial organizations today.
So precisely what value is dotGNU bringing to the table?
Regarding the incorporation of old C libraries into DotGNU, it seems rather optimistic to assume they can just be wrapped or turned into managed code (ask MS about the effort invested in doing that for their code). Do these libs happen to support Dotnet style internationalization, multithreading, access control...? If not, you've got a huge chunk of work to do - and all to get you roughly where Python is already!
At least OOo's XML is compressed in a zip file. Everything I've seen is that good sized documents are decently small in OOo. Compare the same document content in a Word file to an OOo file.
I say this because I fear some may get the impression that OOo's document format is inefficient based on the parent post.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
They have a lot of complex information to store inside a Word XML file. Complex information leads to a complex schema. Did your version of a 'good' XML file include version numbers, authors, previous authors, styles, number of paragraphs, number of lines, default fonts, company information, etc.? Did it have support for tracking multiple changes in the document by multiple authors?
I think that you're complaining because there wasn't line breaks in the file or something, affecting human readability.
I mean it's not your doing I know - but loudly trumpeting XML compliance and arranging for it to be no bloody good to anyone would be just the sort of trick your employer is famous for,
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Microsoft has never had a problem with open standards in markets that they don't control. Weren't they lobbying for an IM open standard a while ago? At the time AOL had the lion's share of the market. At this time no one controls the Web Services market, if there even is one.
Right now Web Services is all about standards, since there isn't much in the way of implementations yet. MSFT and IBM seem to be at odds with the other major players; seems like every major new standard is being duplicated. Can't we all just get along?
> does anyone think it's good software design
Actually, designing software that reformats documents when you change the printer is harder than not doing so.
Word is not a page layout program. It's a wYsiwYg word processor. End lUsers don't want their text running off the side of the page when they print it out.
Feel free to use FrameMaker or use PDF for interchange if you don't like this behavior.
>I've never seen a RTF file get screwed up because of these reasons
Considering that the reference implementation of RTF is Microsoft Word, I doubt it.
Bill Gates (to himself): "Hmm... Everyone hates me, and everyone is aligned against me
This may be true in Slashdotland (where being anti-Microsoft makes you look cool) but in the real world about everyone just love Microsoft. For about everyone in the real world, when there's a bug with a Microsoft product it's the computer's fault or the technician's fault... But when there's a bug with a product from another company it's because it's a crappy product. In the real world, where image is everything, saying Microsoft is a good company makes you look serious and professional.
Word _acts_ like a layout program only very poorly. Sure it is a WYSIWYG but I don't see how this definition has anything to do with it's behaviour, the point of WYSIWYG is that what I see on the screen is what I print, but it also means that what I see is what other people will see as well, and if they don't see the same thing, then something is broken, as in webpages not looking right on different browsers due to not sticking with globally recognized html standards. *hint* IE.
designing software that reformats documents when you change the printer is harder than not doing so.
Then if high quality layout programs (quark for example) or low quality programs don't do this, and it's actually more work to code, and it produces more inconsistent printing, why does MS code Word this way?
Considering that the reference implementation of RTF is Microsoft Word, I doubt it.
I don't use Word for reading or editing RTF files. Outside of that, I really don't know what you are saying...
Unless everyone in the world has the same printer I can't see how both goals are not contradictory.
PDF seems to have no trouble printing identically on all black-and-white printers. If a page layout program must base its formatting decisions on the characteristics of the printer attached to the last computer that edited the file, why not save those characteristics in the document?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Because some files I never plan on printing, have nothing to do with paper and should not be forced to be related to a printer.
If I believed that every word processor in the world did this and it _had_ to do it this way, I wouldn't even bother with a comment. But since _none_ of the other formats or software I've ever used (within my knowledge) base their layout on the printer drivers, then I can only assume this is poorly designed software.
Feel free to prove otherwise, I am certainly not a blind MS basher...
It is what MS always does.
It promotes interoperability when its platforms are not the dominant players in a field.
Remember how its efforts to get AIM opened? Now it's not asking it anymore since MSN is competitive enough.
Now it's apparent - how much market share does Apache have now? How about mod_php? How about IIS? ASP? Is there any wonder MS is seeking interoperability?
does anyone think it's good software design to have a completely external and seperate entity (printer driver) determine how things should be displayed?
No, it's obviously not good software design.
But if I had over 90% market share with my office productivity software, and further profits depended upon me keeping users from migrating to rival office productivty software that must needs be compatible with mine, then the decision to hide the presentation rules makes a hell of a lot of sense from a pure business perspective.
"Provided by the management for your protection."