Microsoft: The next generation
Forget the DOJ ? if you want to figure out how Microsoft will morph over the next few years, the elusive NGWS is the key
By Mary Jo Foley
ZDNN
April 28 ? While all eyes are focused on the effects that a possible breakup of Microsoft Corp. might have on the company?s future, few are contemplating the more immediate impact of the launch of the software giant?s forthcoming services architecture, dubbed Next Generation Windows Services, or NGWS.
?There?s been a Holy Grail about that being Java-based, there?s been Holy Grails about that being CORBA-based, there?s been Holy Grails about that being SAA-based, there?s been many Holy Grails. Here?s a new one.?
? STEVE BALLMER
at New York Financial Services Summit, April 19
IF YOU BELIEVE Microsoft, NGWS is going to be big. Really big.
Microsoft executives have likened the potential impact of the NGWS launch to Microsoft?s 1995 Internet Strategy Day. They are publicly touting the NGWS rollout as a major inflection point for the company.
NGWS will provide Microsoft?s three-year-plus road map for its products and strategies across the board. Consequently, it is being masterminded by the top officials from the company?s three major divisions ? Platforms Group vice presidents Jim Allchin and Paul Maritz, Business Productivity Group VP Bob Muglia, and Consumer Group VP Rick Belluzzo ? working in conjunction with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates.
Despite NGWS? promised cataclysmic significance (not to mention the fact that its unveiling is only about a month away), Microsoft?s partners and customers claim they have absolutely no clue what NGWS is or how it will affect them.
Analysts say they have not received any kind of prelaunch briefings. Even some Microsoft insiders are wondering aloud if NGWS has progressed beyond slideware. And Microsoft isn?t commenting in any way on its super-secret plans.
?We expect there will be things like megaservices and app hosting. But as far as delivering a unified strategy, (NGWS) is still a work in progress,? said Summit Strategies analyst Dwight Davis.
Despite the dearth of information, it is possible to piece together a fairly comprehensive picture of what NGWS is and how it will work, based on some of the recent speeches and demos Microsoft execs have delivered.
NGWS was originally slated to debut this month at an event Microsoft christened Forum 2000. Then the date slipped to May. Now, it looks like Microsoft is shooting for June.
NGWS is a framework ? something like IBM?s now-defunct Systems Application Architecture ? not a product or set of products. It is the realization of Microsoft?s 2-year-old promise of turning software into a service. In the fall of 1998, Microsoft leaked to selected journalists a 14-page memo written by Gates to Microsoft?s top managers. Gates outlined his ideas for automating software delivery via a service dubbed ?Windows Tone,? or WinTone. For a monthly or annual fee, users would receive software upgrades and store their data on the network via some type of hosting arrangement.
?There aren?t really going to be any new products connected with NGWS,? said an official with a major Microsoft software and services partner, who requested anonymity.
?There will be lots of rebranding and repackaging.?
WINDOWS DNA BY ANOTHER NAME?
Whenever it finally rolls out NGWS, Microsoft better get it right.
In the past, the company has done an abysmal job at articulating complex, all-encompassing architectures.
Witness its Windows Distributed interNetworking Architecture, aka Windows DNA. Microsoft describes Windows DNA as a ?platform for building and deploying interoperable Web applications that get to market quickly ? from high-traffic e-commerce Web sites to corporate intranets to enterprise supply chain integration.?
Windows DNA is really a catch-all name for Microsoft?s middleware plumbing technologies that are embedded in Windows 2000 ? things like Internet Information Server, COM+, network load balancing, message queuing ? plus many of its back-end server products, including Exchange Server, SQL Server, SNA Server and BizTalk Server.
Throw in Visual Studio, and you?ve got Windows DNA, not to mention nearly Microsoft?s entire product stable, minus the client.
?In the next five years there will be no difference between a program, a Web site and an application. We?ll think about those three notions as all merging.?
? STEVE BALLMER
at VBITS, San Francisco, Feb. 16 Windows DNA isn?t going away. Many expected NGWS to take the form of DNA revisited when Microsoft first floated the NGWS acronym in January.
Instead, sources say, DNA will underlie NGWS. But Microsoft has learned its lesson this time around. It is likely to attempt to freshen up its middleware story by talking less about the underlying plumbing and more about the software-as-services scenarios it will enable.
Despite all the fancy demos Microsoft will likely trot out on D-Day, NGWS, like Windows DNA, really is about middleware. Just as Microsoft promised to Internet-enable all its products at the 1995 Internet Strategy Day, it will commit to XML-enabling all of its future offerings at NGWS Day. For, without Web standards like XML, HTTP and the emerging Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Microsoft cannot erase the distinction between Web sites and application software, one of its stated goals for NGWS.
Microsoft execs have talked, in grand terms, about NGWS providing a completely new and improved client and server vision from Microsoft. In fact, say sources, NGWS won?t really be about Windows at all, except to the extent that NGWS will ? surprise, surprise ? work best in a pure Windows environment.
Windows 2000 and its successor code-named Whistler are designed to include embedded middleware facilities like XML, COM+, IIS, message queuing, transaction processing and the like. But customers and partners will likely have to wait until Windows 2002/2003, the release code-named Blackcomb, to take advantage of the robust scalability and server-farm support that truly distributed computing scenarios require.
MICROSOFT STILL PC-CENTRIC
Microsoft is expected to show off a new user interface that runs on all kinds of Pocket PC, cell phone and other devices when it debuts NGWS. The natural-language-based portallike interface may or may not be based on the future MSN architecture, code-named Mars, on which Microsoft has been working.
?And in this generation, as I say, programs, our Web sites, our applications and every Web site will become programmable, and every software product of the past becomes a Web service of the future.?
? STEVE BALLMER
at VBITS
But Microsoft is not moving completely toward a thin-client or no-client architecture, like some of its competitors, such as Sun Microsystems, are doing. That?s because Microsoft is too dependent on fat clients running on PCs to give up on PCs or three-tier architectures altogether.
Nor will Microsoft?s back-end operating system or application software be getting any slimmer, say sources. Instead, Microsoft applications like Exchange and SQL Server merely will become easier to distribute, and thus better suited to running in hosted configurations. And Exchange Server?s Web Store will become the default repository, or storage facility, for the XML objects and XML schema that developers and customers can use to build programmable Web sites and apps.
The Microsoft product that will be undergoing the biggest NGWS-inspired transformation will be Visual Studio 7, the next version of Microsoft?s development environment, currently due out at the end of calendar 2000. Besides retrofitting VB7 to incorporate support for XML, Microsoft is adding Active Server Pages Plus (ASP-plus) and a new forms-based programming capability to the product that will allow developers to more easily write Web-enabled applications and publish them to the Web.
Microsoft officials have said the overriding goal of NGWS will be to make programming so simple that even end users can write Web-enabled apps. Forms are one way the company will deliver on its simplicity promise. Megaservices are another. Megaservices, according to Microsoft?s definition, are hosted Web components from Microsoft and third parties that can be snapped together to create Internet-enabled apps and sites. Microsoft thus far has rolled out two megaservices: its Passport Internet-authentication service and ClearLead contact-management service.
THE GOSPEL, ACCORDING TO STEVE B
While Microsoft will have its work cut out for it, in terms of making these kinds of plumbing changes understandable to anyone other than sophisticated programmers, no one can say it won?t give it the old college try.
CEO and President Steve Ballmer already has been expounding on the NGWS gospel in recent months.
?Literally, every application category that exists today will be changed (by NGWS),? Ballmer told attendees of a Goldman Sachs technology symposium in February.
?There will be nobody who will be able to survive if they don?t morph their application into one of these Web services. There will be hundreds of new startups again that focus in on this next-generation opportunity because the kind of functionality that you?ll be able to provide will simply be so dramatically different that no Web site and no application vendor will not seize the opportunity.?
If Ballmer can get the market as fired up as he is, NGWS might enable Microsoft to reinvent itself ? before the government has a chance to do so.
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