A Different Revolution

Microsoft announced a revolution in 2000 and said .Net was it - the biggest change to computing since the Internet. But as it turned out, .Net was the result of a revolution, not the cause of it. What brought .Net to its current status - a solid set of development tools among several solid sets of development tools - were forces outside of Microsoft's control: CIOs' need to rein in out-of-control, heterogeneous environments in a low-cost way, the development of XML outside of any vendor's purview, the development of Web services standards as a reaction to the development of XML. The Internet.

"To me, the revolution occurred 10 years ago, when transactions moved to the Internet," FedEx's Carter says. "If you look back, just 10 years ago, everything we did to connect mainframes, and Unix and Windows and VAXes, was proprietary network linkage. How we reached out to customers was with dedicated lines, dial-in services, SNA and DecNet and TTY dial-up, terminal emulation. In a mere decade, we've gone from all these expensive and private custom interfaces to an assumption that everyone can touch the interface layer. And now we've got this services orientation that lets us touch that interface layer in a much easier way still. It's making computing very horizontal. It's profound."

Carter gives credit to Microsoft for making .Net real. ".Net launched with a flourish and a lot of fanfare before there was a 'there' there," he says. "Now it's evolved to the point where it's useful, and it's time to put it to work.

"It's time to put points on the board."

Sidebar: Microsoft Goes All In

Redmond is betting CIOs will have to connect their Web services offerings to Office and Windows - a bet Google is willing to call

By now, .Net was supposed to be the centrepiece of Redmond's empire. Yet when Microsoft met with Wall Street analysts this past northern summer, the company didn't focus on .Net. Instead, CEO Steve Ballmer concentrated on "anchor businesses", such as Windows and Office.

But the latest version of Windows was four years ago; the next isn't due for a year.

Microsoft is facing so much scepticism on Wall Street that in late September the company announced a huge reorganization. The reorganization is "part of driving software-based services in competition with anybody else who thinks they're going to use that strategy to get ahead in the marketplace", Ballmer said in a Wall Street Journal interview. "We're not the only guy who's going to try to deliver software that has a service-based component. We need to get there aggressively and quickly."

But Microsoft still has faith that your average businessperson weaned on Excel, Outlook and Word will continue to prefer those applications to anything Web-based. Windows and Office, Microsoft argues, can simply do more than a browser - better graphics, more complex applications, more immediacy than the click-and-wait world of the Web. CIOs will want to develop Web services for Windows and Office because of these "rich" features. And Microsoft is doing everything it can to encourage Web services development on top of Windows and Office, including creating a development toolset specifically for Office. One product of that would be Mendocino, an effort to use Office as a front end for SAP's ERP software.

Microsoft is betting that if you try to take Windows and Office away from users - no matter how much sense it makes financially or from a development point of view - they'll revolt. The appeal of Mendocino is that it's something everyone is comfortable with - Office - fronting something everyone is uncomfortable with, ERP. As FedEx executive VP and CIO Rob Carter says of his decision to integrate his .Net Web service with Office, "The vast majority of the world finds the Microsoft desktop productive and standard. For people who want it, we could provide a browser interface. It just won't be the same."

But what if it became the same? Users are comfortable with browsers too. And technologies, such as Ajax, are being developed right now that make browsers quite rich, with the kind of immediate gratification and deep visual and complex transaction capabilities of a desktop application. Front and centre with these kinds of Web applications is Google, Microsoft's new nemesis. (Many observers say it's this threat - Google, its applications and the fact that it keeps taking Microsoft developers away - that spurred the massive reorganization in Redmond.) Google Earth and Google Suggest, among others, are just hints at what Web-biased developers want to do with the Web: Take it out of its click-and-wait heritage and take on Microsoft.

Sidebar: Update on Microsoft's Early November "Live" Announcement

On November 1, Microsoft unveiled its software-as-a-service strategy. This harks back to Microsoft's original announcement of .Net five years ago, when it was unclear what .Net was but there were intimations that you'd be able to use Office online through a browser.

So, five years later, they've got there. Sort of. It's probably a necessary strategy. Google scares the bejeezus out of Microsoft and there have long been rumours that Google is working on an Office-like suite you could access online - even having the guts of your operating system online so that all you'd need is a browser and some good hardware with a little (Linux?) OS to boot up and get online. Clearly Google is trying to take on Microsoft by making the features and applications people want accessible through the Web.

The key to all this has been Ajax and other development technologies that make browsing more like working on your PC. The concept behind a technology like Ajax is that it makes Web sites "richer" and more "application-like". The reason applications rose to prominence was that they were instantly available and very rich, because they had all that local horsepower to drive them. Then the Web came along and it was compelling but its limitation has always been its click-and-wait architecture. Pages take longer to load and all the horsepower in the world on your PC can't get the data across the wire and all those routers any faster than what we currently experience, which is a lot less instant and rich than applications.

Now, Ajax and other technologies have used clever ways to make Web browsing richer, more instant and with far more features. There will be fewer "pages" to click through and when you click to ask for something, you'll get it the way you got it in an application: nearly instantly. There are young, developing versions of productivity software done through Ajax online (Zimbra has an e-mail/calendaring system). There are online word processors and even a page where you can do all your Instant Messaging right in the browser through Ajax. If you go to the Wikipedia page for Ajax, there's a long list of pages that have developed tools like this.

Here's something else no one - neither Microsoft nor Google - has figured out yet. If this "rich Web" takes off, what happens to online ad revenue? Already a massive number of users block ads on the Web. Now come along rich Web applications and those will require fewer page click-throughs - instead the information you demand is loaded dynamically into the page you're looking at rather than going through the trouble (and time) to load a whole new page. So now, an ad business based on click-throughs, in which many people are already blocking those ads out, has fewer pages in which to load ads. It's not clear how ad revenue will be affected by these technological changes and it's even less clear if the ad revenue Microsoft is counting on to supplant its subscription fees can match those notoriously high licensing revenues they've garnered from Windows and Office over the years.

So from a technical standpoint, Microsoft's announcement is only mildly interesting - they're joining a developing game (sooner than they joined the Internet game relative to those competitors, no doubt, but still it's not "innovative" on Microsoft's part, per se). It's more interesting that it's this big huge company (well, one besides Google) doing this instead of some little start-up.

And it's most interesting to see how they work out the business model. Office online is easy to understand. But why do I want to pay those massive licence and subscription fees to get stuff through a browser when all these other people (Google, Zimbra and so on) will offer me similar functionality without that Windows layer or Windows prices? Why would I buy Windows at all if all I need is a browser to get Office or other productivity software, my chat client, and my e-mail? If it's done over the Web, it's much more cost effective for me to get a Linux box (no licence fee) with a Firefox browser (free/no licence fee) and a ton of horsepower. (Note: this Windows Live thing doesn't support Firefox yet - will it? If not, then this is a new lock-in strategy).

Microsoft, like I said in the breakout "Microsoft Goes All In", is counting on our inculcation. We're used to Windows and Office, how they work, look and feel. They are hoping we won't switch to less expensive, possibly less functional, and certainly less used Web services that do the same thing as theirs, simply because we're used to theirs.

Sidebar: Definition of .Net Please

A sample of definitions of .Net from Microsoft

Even today when most everyone considers .Net a development framework, Microsoft is trying to market it as more than that. A sample of definitions of .Net from Microsoft:

".Net is the Microsoft Web services strategy to connect information, people, systems, and devices through software."

- Microsoft.com (www.microsoft.com/net/Basics.mspx)

"When I say .Net, I am talking specifically about a chunk of technology that ships in Windows and Visual Studio. That's the framework. But in other places for non-developer audiences, the term .Net has an appeal because it speaks to the connected nature of applications."

- John Montgomery, director of the .Net Developer Product Marketing Group

"I like to think about .Net as more than just one thing, depending on who you are. One, it's about Web services. It's about XML and it's about managed code in the .Net. framework. But it's true of all decent brands - .Net, Java, WebSphere, the PC, what is it? They have flexible definitions depending on who you are."

- Sanjay Parthasarathy, Corporate Vice President, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group

"I define .NET in two ways. One, when .NET is used in the abstract, and two, when .NET refers to an actual physical software component (the .NET Framework). When we use .NET in the abstract, which folks are doing less and less of these days to help clear up any ambiguity, .NET communicates the notion of 'connectedness'. I know that is an awful word, but it does convey the notion we're trying to get across with regard to the ease of integration that .NET and the support of XML Web services are intended to drive. When discussing the physical manifestation of .NET, which is the .NET Framework (or, the .NET Compact Framework, for mobile devices), we're simply talking about a software component that is embedded in many of our key products, and that solution vendor partners can embed within their solutions, that will allow those products and solutions to share and consume XML data with other products and solutions."

- Tony Jacobs, Global Industry Marketing Manager - Financial Services