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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.'
if you can't beat 'em, pretend you want to be friends so you don't look as bad (and hopefully they'll let you in on a small piece of the pie)
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
It's in their best interest to do this.
Believe it or not, corporations would rather buy the MSFT tools to use under linux than to use the free as in whoopty-doo alternative.
I'd love to be able to develop using VS.Net, and run under linux. Simply because it's a kick-ass tool.
They aren't stupid, the future is interoperability. Windows will become less and less of a cash cow, they need to move in different directions.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The point is just because he said lots of fuzzy words today it doesn't mean he won't try to "cut off the oxygen supply" of those same groups tomorrow. Is he suddenly buddy-buddy with Linux? Nope, his company is still fighting it tooth and nail around the world, putting out FUD, doing whatever it takes to head it off at the pass.
Good PR moments such as this do not negate the overall approach Gates will take. Do not be fooled, he's the same old monopolist.
"Erode competition's standing" could be OK or not OK. That really depends on what specific action is being done.
OF COURSE he's going to say something like that.
Because of what he says in this article, there are now pointy-haired managers out there that are saying to themselves, "Well, we were considering using Linux, but instead we'll buy Microsoft for now and we can still switch in the future if we want. Microsoft uses standards -- Bill would never lie to make a buck."
Bill Gates doesn't want to make people think that Microsoft is the devil.
...just my 2 gil.
Bill Gates (to himself): "Hmm... Everyone hates me, and everyone is aligned against me, creating their own web services standards and ensuring that I won't completely capture the market. Let's see... This implies that they might take a significant part of the market, and if I'm not interoperable, I'll be essentially locked out. Ah, well, screw it."
(calls up Ballmer)
Bill Gates: "Hey, Steve -- do me a favor, would you? Round up some of our better R+D guys, and have them work up a system that lets us totally interoperate with all the other, competing web services systems out there, wouldja?"
Ballmer: "WTF???"
Bill Gates: "Why lock ourselves out of a big chunk of the market? We've got our section, now we can play with their section too."
Ballmer: "Ok, I'm on it..."
This is strictly hypothetical, but I bet it's pretty close.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Well, it's because past history with Microsoft shows a very definite trend of Microsoft making proclaimations like this, then subtly slipping in things that completely change the nature of the situation. For instance, Microsoft Office has perverted XML and RTF under the name of "open standards".
The old saying of once bitten twice wary still applies. In general, we refuse to take Gates at face value and continue to look for the fine print, but it would be nice if the guy would actually change his ways...
I've always said the best thing MS could do (in the past, anyway) was to distribute Linux.
For example, if they grabbed something like Caldera - with no significant upgrade path, and bundle it with their server products... They could say "Hey! Do what you want, but you'll probably find Windows easier and better). If not, they still sold a Windows server license.
This would also decimate desktop aspirations for Linux too, since they got both in the box, Joe Sixpack would prefer Linux, and even technical users would try their FVWM/Kernel 2.0 distro and say "Neat, but look how much more advanced Windows is!"
Then millions more people would at least say "I've tried Linux"
It's all in the spin.
Of course, this ain't so good for we Linux evangelists...
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
I'm not going to hold my breath; it's more likely we'll see more software designed to lock in their own users and lock out the rest of the world, regardless of current PR bleating.
If they want to convince "us" (namely the OSS community/free world/whatever you want to call it) they have to come up with actions, not blather. We've had enough of the latter.
The assumption is based on the fact that Microsoft's business has been built on leveraging their advantages in one realm to take over another. There are a number of MS products that would never be used by anybody if it wasn't for the fact that they come bundled with other products that are good.
My sense is that Microsoft will play as though they are open to working with these third parties because they really have no choice. Under the covers they will do what they can to subvert these other systems.
For the record, I'm sure IBM or Sun would do the same thing if they had the power to do so.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Exactly.
.net webservices can talk to all these systems, then Bill's a candidate vendor for my project. If they can't, I can't use Bill's groovy dotNet buzztechnology and he makes zero dollars and zero cents.
Say I'm setting up a holiday booking site on the Web. I'm going to offer the whole package.
so I need to talk to, let's say, an airline booking system written in COBOL on a VAX, a variety of car hire booking systems , some in C on Solaris, some in J2EE on Linux, and so forth, a whole bunch of hotel chains' booking systems, train companies, maybe theme park tickets...
If Bill's
Whatever else he may be, Bill's not a sufficiently rubbish businessman to turn down that money.
TomV
And when you're 2nd or 3rd place, it's wise to do as the leaders do.
:)
Then if/when you gain a stronger footing, you can open your Dirty Tactics (tm) book and begin the takeover.
Then once you're #2 or #1, you start deviating from the standards, thus making it more difficult for the losers to interoperate.
Stuff a couple more billion in the bank, donate a couple million with grand fanfare, and you're really showing who's boss
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Even assuming you're not joking, but assuming that you entered it correctly, what's <; w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/> doing in there, or <; w:style w:type="list" w:default="on" w:styleId="NoList">? Is that Slashcode munging your text, or is that in the source? ";" isn't a valid name for an element.
Also, I'm curious, but what happens when you toggle the value in <w:saveInvalidXML w:val="off"/>?
"We're being as inclusive as we can", Gates said...
I.e. inclusive enough to give away 15% of the market to rivals and keep antitrust guys off our backs, but not inclusive enough to risk losing customers to any web services running on alternative OSes?
--LinuxParanoid, who doesn't yet believe Gates's philanthroipc altruism extends to other software companies
P.S. Note Gates's observation that "Standards are always a give-to-get bargain" and ask yourself "what does Gates think he is getting?" There are a variety of possible answers.
The whole POINT of XML is interoperability. So can this XML be used by someone else? Is it limited to Office?
If the namespaces can't be reused by another applicaiton, then NO, it isn't "cool" what MS did. It's the classic MS crap. They may as well have forgone the entire process and left it in a binary format.
"Proprietary" XML is marketing blather and not something that adds value to the end user...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Standards from Microsoft are dangerous, even when royalty-free licensing is offered so that they can be implemented in Free Software.
Consider for example the ECMA standards 334 and 335 for the core parts of .NET - while Microsoft has promised royalty-free licensing for any and all patents that may be neccessary for implementing that standard, they are at the same time embracing and extending their own standard, and they have filed at least one patent application that seems to be designed to give them a monopoly on their extensions to the standard.
In some situations it may work to simply refuse to go along with the standards attempts from MS. Unfortunately, MS has so much leverage that this won't always work. For example, with .NET just ignoring it IMO won't work, that's why we're working on creating a competing "standard set of libraries" for the stuff which goes beyond the stuff that is safe from patent-based attacks (the safe parts are what is specified in the ECMA specs, for which MS has promised royalty-free licensing, plus everything which is thin wrappers around stuff that is simply too old to be affected by .NET patents, such as for example System.Windows.Forms). 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.
Greetings,
Norbert.
Let me clarify for you:
I send him the file with basic formatting and it looks fine in Word 2000. (office 2000) I send him the file and he opens it, and the words are in the wrong place, the formatting is either gone or changed.
This is even based on templates from within Word itself. He even sent me the file back to make sure it wasn't corrupted, and the file was fine on word 2000.
This is _not_ a user error, it's simple lack of proper backwards compatibility.
"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."
I think the above is a great ideal and I personally prefer to work for companies that work like that, but many don't.
For a lot of companies they got successful, or maybe they feel they got successful, partly by luck. It was a matter of having the right product at the right time and making the right guesses about the market. A LOT more businesses fail than succeed because of timing or bad guesses. Starting a business is almost like gambling.
So when you hit success it's far far easier to resist and fight new markets than to submit to them, because the existing market is one where they're already a success while the new one would almost be like starting over again.
Bill should just love it because it is based on 100% Microsoft technologies.
I hope some kind soul will do this.
Set up a Windows 2003 server running ASP.NET and also a copy of the new high end MS Office that writes XML documents. Write a web service (i.e. a front end to a remote function call) that...
Now other office suites, such as OpenOffice.org, or any software package could simply make such a function call to such a server to convert documents into MS-XML as a prelude to further processing the MS-XML into OpenOffice.org-XML.
Heck Sun could host such a service.
Standard macros could be included in OOo which convert Word documents, via. this network based service, into OOo documents.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Who is saying MS is/will forever use only XML in their formats? I think it's naive of us to think just because they use XML that it will be compatible and remain compatible with other office like products.
This is a trust issue. The last thing I want to find out is that after 3 upgrades to office, I can no longer open any of my archived documents, or that I have to upgrade again to maintain my documents. Also, I don't want to have to upgrade Office just because my clients have a newer version so I can't read their files.
This is what concerns me is that my data is in a format that is in constant limbo without long term gurantees of the integrity of the applications (or it's formats) that create and update my data.
Considering that within 1 upgrade cycle I have lost information, what will happen within 2 or 3? Sure you can keep older copies of office, but what if you no longer can run them because the OS they are on is obsolete you upgraded that as well? You also can't have more than one version of Office on one machine at the same time, etc...
This is a real problem, not an imaginary one that is based on opinions about XML. XML is a markup language, my opinion about how to use it is actually irrelevant.
That's interesting, does anyone think it's good software design to have a completely external and seperate entity (printer driver) determine how things should be displayed? What if neither one of us had a printer installed? What if I change my printer in the future? I will then lose my formatting? This some how sounds insane...
I personally think that MS should have enough foresite to see this as an issue and make some kind of abstraction layer between file data and printer drivers.
I've never seen a PDF, TXT, or RTF file get screwed up because of these reasons...
When Microsoft talks "standards" and "interoperability", it generally means...
We'll take an existing standard, make it "better" (bloat, non-standard syntax, non-compliant), market the crap out of it, and then everyone else can adopt it so that your products work happily with ours.
In other words... "make your program work with our software which was coded by pot-smoking-monkeys-on-typewriters (tm), and it will be interoperable."
I don't particularily think that they need "a higher standard" I think they need an "open standard". If I am wrong, and their standard is fine with people who are more in the know than I am, great.
But since I don't trust Microsoft, I won't be investing any more money in Office just because my concerns over formats have been cured by their implementation of XML.
All of these changes has caused some information loss.
I suppose, but at least I know those formats won't be changed in the future with the itention of product lock-in. Also, from what I have read, some Office documents contain personally identifying information about the creator of the document, I haven't taken the time to look into it though.
Actually I was thinking all those articles with RMS, ESR and other "open source luminaries" speaking about "embattled SCO" sound right out of the Onion. Or Fark, actually.
It doesn't get any better than "they're smoking crack" on national media.
But don't let that bring you down.
Hard not too be, I just had a bad crash with win2k after upgrading to Service Pack 4, and the thought of having to reinstall Office yet again (ugh) has pushed me to using Open Office.
Also, I lost tons of sensitive data because I used Microsoft's default encryption for my data files and when I reinstalled win2k, I could no longer access my files because Win2k thought I was a different user. After hours of searching online for how to solve this and get my information from my own computer I have gone slightly mad. (and I still can't get my data)
So use an earlier version of Office supporting XML and save it to a different format.
The last thing I want to have todo is reinstall windows on my machine so I can install an older version of office (as you can't downgrade it or uninstall it fully) just to manage my data....
If it were only paranoia and not real world agony I would be relieved...
Please name one software package other than StarOffice/OpenOffice that has announced their product will be able to read and write OOo XML.
KOffice. Did you have any further questions?
Finkployd