... what I can not reproduce here is the accompanying sketch of Scotty boy nailing Billy boy with a thundering right to the midsection ... both are sketched with boxing gloves - Billy with the Windows logo on his gloves, and Scotty with the Sun logo on his ... man, I like that Economist, always on the side of goodness and virtue - as well as almost always being correct on all things important <G>.
Ken
Round three
Feb 8th 2001 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
THE software industry is driven by ideological punch-ups. After the
operating-system wars of the 1980s and the browser wars of the
1990s, the business is now engaged in a third big fight: over the
emerging standards for software that runs on the web. In the blue
corner, as usual, is Microsoft, the victor of the last two rounds. It is
touting its nebulous .NET initiative, announced last year, as the
“platform” on which to construct web-based software. Chief among its
opponents is Sun Microsystems, a seller of both hardware and
software, which unveiled its own approach on February 5th. Sun,
crowed Microsoft, was racing to catch up.
In fact, the opposite is true.
In many ways, .NET is
Microsoft’s admission that
Sun was right all along—that
software should be a service
provided over a network, not
an add-on to a PC. Sun,
along with IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and
others, has been pushing this
“software as a service” model
(which conveniently relies on expensive hardware and software,
rather than cheap PCs) for years; .NET is merely Microsoft’s more
PC-centric take on it.
The result is an unusual consensus that the future of software lies in
web-based services based on emerging open standards (ie, not
owned by any particular vendor) with names such as SOAP, UDDI and
XML. After years of pushing proprietary products that do not work with
other companies’ offerings, big computer firms are now collaborating
on standards and competing on implementation.
Well, almost. Each company still has a few favoured proprietary
technologies. What divides Microsoft from the rest of the industry is its
attitude to Java, Sun’s versatile programming language, which allows
pieces of software to be snapped together and reused. Microsoft saw
Java as a boon to programmers, but a threat to the dominance of its
Windows operating system. Sun accused its rival of sabotage when
Microsoft tried to link the two together.
The result was a lawsuit, settled last month after four years. Microsoft
agreed to abandon Java in favour of its own Java-like language, called
C#, and is encouraging programmers to switch to it. That threatens a
schism. Programmers building web services must choose between
Microsoft’s .NET and the Java-based way favoured by the rest.
Sun’s announcement this week was an attempt to clarify its software
strategy and stand up for Java. While Microsoft bangs the drum for
.NET, the Java-based approach risks losing ground until it has been
given a snazzy name (programmers’ bosses are suckers for that).
Sun has dubbed its software strategy ONE, which stands for Open Net
Environment. Unlike .NET, a big shift in strategy for Microsoft, ONE is
really just a new name wrapped around Sun’s existing products, with
the promise of more products to come next year. Meanwhile, Microsoft
has been doing some rebranding of its own. It announced on February
5th that the next versions of Windows and Office will be named
Windows XP and Office XP; the suffix stands for “experience”,
apparently.
IBM and Oracle have already presented their visions of web services,
and Hewlett-Packard is due to do so next week, so Sun was simply
falling into line with ONE. But although the names differ, all of these
Microsoft rivals are essentially promoting the same platform, albeit
with some minor variations (Oracle with an emphasis on databases,
IBM with an emphasis on mainframes and Linux, and so on). The
common use of Java and open standards means that their products
can be mixed and matched more easily than in the past. It is true that
this approach lacks the single-minded focus with which Microsoft is
pushing .NET. But with customers increasingly reluctant to commit
themselves to a single vendor’s vision, that fuzziness may prove to be
an advantage. |
