What's in HailStorm that will interest businesses?
HailStorm is about individual-oriented things, not consumer-oriented. It's about your profile. Take the idea of you being interrupted during this interview. What's important enough that your mobile phone should ring and interrupt you? That is personal to you. It's not device-specific. It's across many devices. It's related to your business life as well.
So HailStorm embraces the idea that information works on your behalf?
It makes sure communications get unified. You get notified when someone is calling you for a flight change, or a customer who is unhappy, or your boss wants to get a hold of you--that kind of thing is in HailStorm. And there is a broader (business-to-business) effort--a huge B2B effort--about schemas for supplier enablement, this idea of suppliers being delivered XML (Extensible Markup Language) information, and all they need is Office as a rich visualisation tool. They don't have to change their (information technology) software or anything complicated. (XML is a popular Web standard by which businesses can easily exchange data between employees, customers, partners and suppliers.)
Where is most of your XML work being directed?
Our XML work is extremely relevant to businesses. In fact, the majority of the XML work we are doing relates to businesses and B2B. HailStorm, in particular, because it is oriented around the individual, has a large piece that is consumer-oriented. But this idea of state management and communications profiles--that is interesting to people inside corporations. With HailStorm inside your company, instead of looking at Passport for authentication, it will connect to Active Directory. So the only time you need to go out to the Internet within a business is when you want to go between businesses.
As described by Microsoft, HailStorm has to be hosted on servers globally for the system to work. How do you plan to do that and ensure security?
We are doing a lot. All of those things are being done with other people. The very protocols of the Internet will evolve for security and quality of service and richer caching. And so we are out talking with the Ciscos and the Akamais and Intel--you name it--for that level of stuff. They want to evolve their products, too, to work with Web services. So they are very anxious to talk to us to support broad industry developments and our services, in particular. In the XML Web services world, the idea of having properties that let caching and security and quality of service work in better ways is fairly natural because these XML payloads have no properties.
What about consulting firms? Which ones are working with Microsoft on .Net and HailStorm?
The whole theme of what we are doing with developers is XML Web services. Microsoft has a massive program to focus on Accenture and some other systems-integrator guys. We have a broad training program with Accenture. When people go into those training classes, it's all XML Web services. I mean, the showcase product for all developers is Visual Studio.Net. That is the Microsoft strategy; we have bet our future on that. The demand for these consultants wanting to learn about our Web services tools is super high. It's a phenomenal thing. It's more of the pioneering customers that know they need Web services. But it's clear the whole marketplace is coming around to this.
How do you view competitive plans from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the Web services area?
With HP, we are very complementary. There is a lot of ongoing work to make sure that the work we do and the work they do, that customers get the combined benefit...In the case of IBM, every day you can write an article about IBM and Microsoft this or that, because we work on so many things and we compete on so many things. IBM is the biggest company in the computer industry by most measures. We are the biggest by just the volume of our model, (which) means our products are out there in big numbers.
So the work we do together is pretty important. We are very pleased that IBM is serious about XML Web services. If you look at standards efforts like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), IBM has been a very good partner. When it comes to implementing the platform, they go and do WebSphere and we go and do .Net.
It's like it has been on everything. In some cases they actually license our stuff, like they sell Windows-based servers. And they are taking their hardware technology and doing good Windows-based portables. XML is an industrywide standard that, if people implement properly, people get the highest level of interoperability ever seen between different platforms. But commercial companies implement these platforms. And IBM has a lot of disparate pieces, but they all kind of go under the WebSphere brand. In our case it's all .Net.
And what about Sun?
Sun is hard to characterise because they make all of their money selling expensive hardware, and they are an industry participant in some of the things as well. We support the Java language. But because of what (Sun has) done to be proprietary, they have not let us use their runtime. In fact, they prevent us from using it. But we have still found ways to support Java.
Sun's pretty much almost about as pure as you can get as a competitor (to Microsoft). Sun believes in expensive hardware. They think that software R&D shouldn't be funded; they think the idea of empowering knowledge workers is a bad idea.
What's Microsoft's stance on Java these days?
Given that Sun has not turned Java over to an industry standards process, Microsoft has really done a great job supporting it as a language in a very rich way. We have the best Java virtual machine (a critical layer of software that enables a program written in the Java programming language to run on a specific computer); we still ship that. And Java is one of the languages in the Visual Studio framework. But the idea that any one language will become the only language has been thoroughly discredited. Java will be one of the languages people care about. That's firmly established.
Visual Basic has changed quite a bit in the 10 years since it was introduced. What do you think the ramp-up time will be for developers, and how quickly will they get used to the new Web services model?
Well, the biggest change in Basic was going from character mode to graphical applications. Visual Basic made that approachable. If you look at the C (programming language) world, it was very hard to make the transition from character-mode to graphical-mode applications because they had to get more down at the raw level. The only way we finally made it tractable--when you saw a graphical application it wasn't a miracle that some genius had written--it was called Microsoft Foundation Classes. And most Windows apps written in C today use MFC.
Well, with the move to XML we have the framework--the modern-era equivalent of the MFC in the .Net framework--that we have defined so that it won't be hard to move up to the XML world. So there is a learning curve around XML, but the tool piece is awfully straightforward. For the people who understand XML, it's not a big transition.
