Taxman,
It means that people are not current on Microsoft's Internet strategy. I was at the Microsoft press briefing last Monday, and it was VERY impressive. Microsoft is going full throttle into Internet platform, tools, and XML-based communications standards for building Internet software services that work with existing applications, Microsoft or not, and support all devices, not just PCs. Microsoft will also be delivering great software services through this infrastructure. People may not yet realize the power of this strategy, but I believe Microsoft is looking at a very bright future as a result.
One of the demos shown was very cool. They had a huge stack of client systems hitting a shopping web site using 3rd party test software to create 4 E-Bays worth of traffic. The servers were divided into 3 tiers, a database tier with 3 clustered database servers, an application component tier with 2 servers (maybe 3), and a web server tier with 4 servers, all inexpensive PC-based servers. First they started putting together a shopping cart on one of the clients. One by one, they powered down (big red switch) the shopping cart's web server, then a random application server, then for the coup de grace, they powered down the main database server. The only noticeable delay was when the database server had to failover (remember the traffic was still online). Through the whole thing, the shopping cart stayed perfectly intact and they completed the purchase. The web site was built with software and tools that are mostly available now, and some when Win2000 ships.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they had a small part of the database (catalog lookup) running in Oracle on a Sun Server to show that legacy interop was all part of the equation.
It will be quite interesting to see the next year playout as Microsoft becomes more of an Internet powerhouse than anyone is expecting.
As my profile states, I work for Microsoft, but these really are my own opinions.
Thanks,
Mike |
