Hellstorm brewing
To understand the controversy surrounding hailstorm, it's necessary to grasp Microsoft's .Net vision of the future.
The goal of .Net--besides profit--is to coax personal computing away from the desktop and encourage it to happen anywhere, everywhere, from cell phones to televisions, watches to cars. The computing is to happen in the background, without a person sitting in a room staring at a screen and pecking at a keyboard. The crux of all of this behind-the-scenes communication is a platform permitting machines to talk with one another.
If Microsoft has its way, .Net will be that platform. Announced last summer, the services are being built on self-contained applications that can be anything from a simple request to send data from point A to point B to complicated business processes.
The Web services, Microsoft says, are intended to serve as software building blocks that may be used by other applications or called upon and combined with other Web services. Instead of writing those building blocks themselves, developers can save time and trouble by licensing them from Microsoft and other .Net developers. The glue that binds these building blocks is eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a "meta language" developed through the World Wide Web Consortium for sharing data and exchanging messages across programming languages, computing platforms and devices.
The easiest way to understand how XML Web services work, Microsoft says, is to compare them to Lego blocks; just like Lego blocks are designed to snap together, so will Web services using XML. "When you snap together XML Web services, you build a software solution that performs a particular task," Microsoft wrote in a White Paper describing .Net. "And just as you can use the same Lego blocks as part of many different objects, you can use a single XML Web service in many different groups, as part of the solution to many different tasks."
In March, Bill Gates announced a set of .Net Web services that he said are designed to provide compelling new ways for consumers to manage their personal information. Code-named HailStorm, these Web services will store personal data in so-called "schemas" that can be accessed by Web sites and services on "behalf" of consumers. Among the schemas already trademarked by Microsoft are myCalendar, myContacts, myDocuments, myNotifications, myProfile and myWallet.
The idea, Gates said, is that consumers store their personal information once. That information can then be accessed by Web services and sites--as long as the consumer has given permission. A customer purchasing an airline ticket on Expedia's Web site, for instance, could allow the HailStorm-certified travel service to automatically check his or her calendar to determine the best flight times. The customer could also grant Expedia access to his or her notification preferences so the travel service can alert him or her--via email, instant messenger, cell phone, personal digital assistant or pager--if the flight is delayed.
Or a HailStorm-certified Web music service could notify a consumer--again based on stored preferences about favourite bands, concert venues and seating preferences--when concert tickets to a local event go on sale.
"On the Internet today, one of the problems we're addressing here is that as you interact with these different sites, as you give out your postcode or your preferences or as you work with [numerous] devices... there's all this disconnection taking place," Gates said during HailStorm's introduction at Microsoft headquarters last month. "Stitching these islands together is about having a standard schema--in fact, a very rich schema--where all this information is stored, and letting all the applications and devices have access to the degree you give them permission to use and update that information."
But there's a caveat. "This whole vision of having multiple devices can only work if, magically, behind the scenes, the information is moving between those devices without the user having to get directly involved," Gates said.
It's this little detail that has alarmed so many analysts and privacy advocates.
