There is bound to be cynicism about Microsoft's .net strategy.
Microsoft promised "an advanced new generation of software that
melds computing and communications in a revolutionary new way".
What it delivered last week was, essentially, XML functionality for
three key product upgrades: Windows 2000 Datacenter, Exchange 2000
and SQL Server 2000.
When a supplier announces a quantum leap that will shape the
next decade of IT, but briefs its own people that 25% of the code
is already written, users are right to switch on their
hype-detectors.
But the "vision" part of the .net strategy is important. It is
Microsoft's survival strategy, prompting the question: if it works,
how will it change computing?
At the heart of the .net strategy is the insistence that
Microsoft will keep its proprietary talons off the emerging open
data standards of the Internet economy. Microsoft's surrender in
the long-running meta data standards war last week was a token of
good intent. So is its repeated reassurance that .net is built on
XML, which is policed by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
If .net is delivered, we will see the transformation of
development tools, operating systems, and end-user devices at the
high-volume, low-cost end of business computing: it will be a
distributed computing environment, with multiple I/O devices and
interchangeable components that ensure common standards across
proprietary software and hardware platforms.
The problem is that Microsoft's path to that nirvana lies
through extending the XML functionality of its products and
services in a way that threatens open standards.
We have seen what can happen with simple browsers: HTML is also
policed by W3C - but that did not stop Microsoft "embracing and
extending" the language beyond its agreed standard format, with
successive versions of Internet Explorer, in a bid to wipe out
rival browsers.
With XML, the opportunities to gain a proprietary stranglehold
over an ostensibly open standard are even greater. HTML is a series
of pre-defined tags whose basics you can learn in an afternoon: XML
is a blank sheet, currently in the process of being filled with
sector-specific meta data in a variety of global standards
conferences. XML would always be more complex and more difficult to
police, even if there were no large IT corporations circling round
it like sharks.
Microsoft thinks the biggest thing wrong with Internet MkI is
that it is "read-only". You can read the Web, but not rewrite it in
real time. And Microsoft slams today's browser software as "a
glorified read-only dumb terminal".
But that's what makes it the Internet: the ability to access
information through an open standard protocol, using open standard
client software. Sure, it's "read-only", but it is also "write-
easily". The static state of the Internet is what allowed it to
take off as a revolutionary one-to-many form of mass
communication.
The Internet MkII should be built on open standards, policed by
user coalitions not IT suppliers. The alternative would be a series
of sophisticated point-to-point closed networks based on IP. There
is a lingering suspicion that this is where .net will lead.
Remember: if you kill the open standards that have allowed HTML
to conquer the planet, you kill the goose that lays the golden
egg.