January 31, 2007
Vista’s secret sauce
So, you’re not rushing out to buy Windows Vista? Why should you? It’s only an operating system, and that’s about as exciting as plumbing.
Judged as plumbing, though, it’s easy to forget what a big deal this is for Microsoft. Deep in the guts of Vista are some pieces of the technology that will play a key part in its longer-term battle against Google et al. They include the drably-named Windows Presentation Foundation (once known by the codename Avalon, and the first overhaul of the Windows graphics technology in 15 years) and Windows Communication Foundation (the subsystem formerly known as Indigo, which lets applications "talk" to each other when they are running on different machines.)
Why does this matter? Well, through the new APIs (application programming interfaces) to these technologies, Microsoft is giving developers the chance to build applications that run smoothly, and look great, even when they are running over a network and working on many different kinds of devices. Remember, Microsoft is first and foremost a platform company, and these are important building-blocks of a Web-based computing platform that extends well beyond the PC. They are showing up first in Vista, but the same building blocks will be embedded in the Windows Longhorn server software when it comes out later this year, and in future Microsoft services over the internet.
Microsoft’s bet is that the sort of "computing in the cloud" represented by Google will always be an incomplete picture. Only the company that spans PCs and other "client" devices, servers and services (ie, Microsoft) can stitch it all together. When it comes to the best way to meet a particular need through software, or the best way to charge for it, there will be "many ways to mix and match," Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategies, tells me: it will depend on the task at hand and how the user wants to pay for it.
"The world will be a giant mash-up of software and services," says Fitzgerald.
We’ll see. By finally launching Vista, though, Microsoft has at least been able to make what it considers an important move in the longer-term chess game against Google.
You’ve got to be kidding!
You are just talking about more proprietary infrastructure and lock-in code from Microsoft, with some distorted (broken) use of open standards, as usual. This is just about coding-up some more of Microsoft’s proprietery .Net architecture.
THE key thing about Vista is that Microsoft jettisoned changing the Windows file system, which was their original intent. Unless you change the file system you don’t really have a new operating system. You can make some cosmetic improvements to the user interface, but many of the root causes of Windows’ security problems are still there (amongst other things).
Microsoft has taken 5 years to produce Vista - which contains 50 million lines of code (which is why it needs 16 GIGABYTES of your PC’s disk, just to install itself!).
Google is playing a different game, and changing the rules. As the very good interview in yesterday’s FT reported, Steve Ballmer knows that it is changes to business models which matters. Microsoft should know, they became successful by making whole industry sectors obsolete. Vista does not help do this, and it is no defence at all against Google.
The product manager you spoke to was just trying to be “on message”, be positive, and throw up a bit of a smoke-screen.
I think we can be pretty sure that Google is not dependent on Microsoft technology to deliver the services which it provides.
While Microsoft has perfectly reasonable products and obviously has its uses, there is a whole open world out there that does not need a line of Microsoft code.
Global climate change is not just about the weather!
Posted by: Chris Riley | January 31st, 2007 at 1:02 pm | Report this commentAnd that’s exactly where they run afoul again of anticompetitive legislation because their APIs are proprietary and cannot be used by the bulk of internet developers at places such as Google, Sun, Yahoo, Novell or IBM who run web applications mostly on Unix and/or Linux.
This isnt about a EU vendetta vs microsoft but about protecting an entire industry and competitive landscape that is currently based on open standards against domination by a single set of APIs and a single company who has been previously convicted for abusing its desktop OS monopoly.
Posted by: Jan Drost | January 31st, 2007 at 1:10 pm | Report this commentYes, there are now alternatives to the Microsoft model, there are (true) open standards rather than the de facto ones that Redmond relies on, and many developers will prefer other environments. Yes, that makes the world a better place.
The point, though, is that we already live in a mixed computing world, and it will only get more mixed. Google needs a better foothold on the client. Microsoft still sets the rules there, its APIs are the ones that unlock the full capabilities of most desktop machines. That looks like it will continue to be the case for the Vista cycle.
Yes, that certainly makes interoperability an anti-trust issue. But Brussels and Washington have backed off from Vista for now. If Microsoft has any success in using the .Net strategy to leverage its desktop monopoly into a broader online computing platform, then you can bet it will end up back in the dock - but that still looks like it’s probably a few years away.
Posted by: Richard Waters | January 31st, 2007 at 8:31 pm | Report this commentRichard, I’m a libertarian but do believe that the internet could use a more proactive attitude from regulatory bodies to maintain a level playing field.
Microsoft repeatedly received convictions and slaps-on-the-wrist both in the US and Europe for its practises past and present. It is reasonable to assume repeat monopolistic offenders will continue to try to leverage an advantage and hence reasonable to try to preempt such drives at dominance so they can no longer unfairly hurt their competitors. Companies such as Netscape, Real, Novell, Commodore and Lotus might have been agile enough to survive (in better shape) on a level playing field, if we had had a layer of regulation with a maturity comparable to for example the financial sector.
As a libertarian I’m against regulation unless the regulation balances an industry to where companies can compete on merit. Rules are critical to industries such as banking, energy and telecoms. Perhaps IT is too complex and standards develop at a pace impossible for a bureaucracy to effectively regulate. Still in this case it might be better to prevent than to cure.
Posted by: Jan Drost | February 2nd, 2007 at 6:21 pm | Report this commentPicking up the theme from the other commenters: Microsoft knows that to make money in software, the important thing is to gain control over the users, and then force them to keep paying. The software doesn’t wear out on its own. So they create closed formats (such as MSWord files), and change the format with each release, forcing users to upgrade so they can read the new files that people start sending them. Do you really think most users *need* the new features in each release of MSWord?
All of Microsoft’s talk about interoperability is just a smoke screen. They know how to make money, and they’re great at it, and it involves no more interoperability than they’re forced into.
Posted by: S. Dolgoff | February 8th, 2007 at 1:32 am | Report this comment