Microsoft's Next Net Awakening

Microsoft is preparing to tie even more functions to Windows, just weeks after a federal judge assailed the vendor for its integration tactics.

With the introduction of its upcoming Next Generation Windows Services planned for this spring, Microsoft is looking to remake the company in the image of the Internet‹or by some accounts, remake the Internet in its own image.

NGWS is Microsoft's effort to let e-business services built on Windows 2000 to be accessed by multiple classes of devices, ranging from smart phones to handheld computers to PCs. NGWS will be a set of enabling technologies that allows seamless communication between applications and server platforms from multiple vendors.

A key component of NGWS is XML, which will provide the interfaces needed to let applications and hardware interoperate.

NGWS will include components for developers to build applications that link disparate systems, said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's director of business development.

"It's important to give companies the ability to leverage off-the-shelf plumbing and allow them to dedicate programming resources to adding value for whatever it is they do," Fitzgerald said. Microsoft expects to provide details about the strategy and technologies in late spring, in an event to be called Forum 2000.

Microsoft will provide a set of seven key services for businesses, including billing, directory, identity, personalization and storage. Fitzgerald would not say to what extent those features will be built into Windows. Also included in NGWS will be relationship management services that control the sharing of data between systems run by different organizations and communications services that control data flow over multiple transports, including LANs, WANs and wireless links, John Connors, Microsoft's chief financial officer, told a group of investors late last month.

Active Directory will be used to identify users and resources on networks. BizTalk will be the server for XML communication between applications, in many cases replacing COM+. Fitzgerald said some BizTalk functionality might be built into Windows, though he declined to elaborate. NGWS will also rely on Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Fitzgerald said. Although new, SOAP will become an important specification to invoke remote procedure calls between applications, said Gartner Group analyst David Smith.

With NGWS, Fitzgerald said, a business traveler sitting in a taxicab could receive a text message on an Internet-enabled cell phone notifying him that the next day's meetings have been cancelled. With a few taps on the screen, the traveler could update his schedule, send a copy of the new schedule to co-workers, reorder an airline ticket and e-mail his family to let them know of the changed plans. This would require coordination of instant messaging, calendaring, e-commerce and e-mail applications from multiple vendors.

Rather than moving in and out of several applications, users will access the Web services from a single interface, which Microsoft is calling the Internet User Experience that will be implemented in Windows and other devices.

NGWS is being touted as a revolutionary change in direction for Microsoft, comparable to the change from command-line DOS to the graphical interface in Windows, or the legendary embracing of the Internet in December 1995.

"It's a milestone," Fitzgerald said. "It's logical to think of this as a bookend to the 1995 announcement. We pretty much completed what we intended to do there‹what comes next?" Fitzgerald said.

Analyst Dan Kusnetzky of International Data Corp. said NGWS will be more interoperable with other operating systems than any previous Microsoft product. Microsoft will make available APIs that work with Unix and other non-Windows operating systems to invoke the services of COM+, ActiveX, Microsoft Transaction Server and Internet Information Server "It still appears to be the same 'embrace and extend' they've used before; it's just at a different level," Kusnetzky said.

But others were more skeptical. "It's more hyperbole around proprietary Internet protocols," said Jim Blizard, a programming supervisor of information systems for Unigard Insurance Group, which has 30 Windows NT servers connected to a mainframe. "I don't put a lot of stock in what vendors say until they provide something to look at‹and Microsoft is along way from that."

David Gee, a vice president of marketing at Sun Microsystems, called NGWS Microsoft's latest effort to force proprietary standards into Internet products.

"This is yet another initiative that is Microsoft-centric and that will continue to try to tie consumers and businesses to Microsoft technologies and reduce choice," Gee said.

Indeed, Microsoft has a history of adding proprietary extensions to Internet standards. Last week, the Web Standards Project, a self-described international grassroots alliance of Web developers, criticized Microsoft for including proprietary versions of Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS1) in its upcoming Internet Explorer 5.5, which will ship with Windows Me, the next-generation consumer Windows desktop.

"The proprietary technology that Microsoft is providing may lure some developers deeper into functionality that is supported on only one browser and one operating system‹Microsoft's," the group said in a statement. But Microsoft's Fitzgerald said Internet Explorer allows users to access existing Web sites, which is the primary requirement for standards compliance. He said DOM is rarely used, and it's uncertain whether developers writing to Microsoft's CSS1 implementation will find that it breaks other browsers.

"There are an infinite number of standards out there. We have to pick and choose which we want to support," Fitzgerald said. "The reality is that Microsoft is doing a better job of supporting standards than anyone else." Microsoft also came under fire last year by analysts, who raised concerns that Microsoft's BizTalk.org effort might contradict vendor-neutral XML organizations, such as RosettaNet and the Organization for the Advancement of Structure Information Standards (OASIS), and could lead to proprietary extensions in its XML implementations; Microsoft called the accusations unfounded. And Microsoft's Windows-specific version of Java was central to a recent court finding by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Microsoft violated federal antitrust laws.

That antitrust suit could throw a monkey wrench into NGWS. Possible outcomes include sanctions regulating the functionality Microsoft can put into Windows 2000.

NGWS would be a welcome benefit for IT managers, but not if it contributes to software bloat, said Prakash Desai, director of strategic IT planning at WellPoint Health Networks. "It would be very useful if it came in a small package. Each generation of Windows is more bloated; we can't afford to keep updating systems," he said.

Still, some are hopeful that NGWS could solve some real problems. Data warehousing is an example in which sharing information between multiple vendors' platforms is difficult, and where NGWS may help, said James Osborn, an operations manager for IT services at Rohm and Haas Co., a petrochemicals company. "Moving data across platforms always needs work," he said.