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.'

Comments

The usual tactic

[FunWithHeadlines]

Nothing new here. Every now and then Gates does something nice or friendly or inclusive. Maybe it's for humanitarian purposes such as through his foundation. Maybe it's motivated by a need for better PR. Maybe it's motivated by something else. Doesn't matter.

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.

Microsoft is hedging its bets.

[crazyphilman]

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.

Here's why...

[sterno]

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.

"We're being as inclusive as we can.."

[LinuxParanoid]

"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.

Re:Exactly

[rutledjw]

I surpised believe you posted this.

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...

Danger - MS is trying to set the standards

[bizcoach]

In the past, the standards for the internet were decided through the community-based process of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This process is based on "rough consensus" and there is no way that a few influential companies could pervert this process in order to use it to establish standards that they can afterwards use to effectively kill their competitors.

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.

Re:Exactly

[Vaughn Anderson]

Either way, it's a user problem.

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.

Here's a great idea for a web service!

[DickBreath]

Here is a great idea for a web service!

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...

• accepts as a parameter, a Word document
• opens it using the server's copy of new Office
• scripts the server to save the document in MS-XML format
• returns the XML as the remote function call result

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.

Re:Exactly

[Vaughn Anderson]

What is the point of XML in your opinion anyways ?

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.