What about the Evil Empire seeking to get control of middleware?
Nobody took the bait from Shane, so I will. The MS announcement
seems to have been mostly ignored because everyone is talking
about the conference, but this is important in the long term.
Could MSFT be looking to license something from BORL in the same
way that MSFT (aka the Great Satan of Software) licensed "java"
from HP?
HA! I guess it all depends on how one interprets that comparison.
On the one hand, HP (was it HP and not Sun?) presumably obtained
some revenue from the licensing, and Java was given a boost with
the additional recognition.
On the other hand, MS licensed and supported Java in IE only after
their first attempt to provide a hastily assembled proprietary
alternative (Active X) failed to push Java out of the marketplace.
Now MS is trying to sabotage Java by adding non-standard extensions,
tying it to Windows. So the licensing was as much a round-about
way to attack Java as a support.
MS is incredibly rapacious. They want control of all programming
standards, not to make things easier for customers as they claim,
but only to grab yet another market segment. Control which gives
them an advantage over any competitors in the market segment,
in the same way that providing the OS gives them an edge
in the applications market. They can twist standards to induce
incompatibilities in competitors' products, and they can provide
advance notice of revisions to their own programmers to give their
products a head-start.
MS won't be doing Borland any favors, except perhaps inadvertently
by driving some other middleware vendors out of business. If MS
introduces their own ORB into NT as a standard, then the market for
middleware could disappear. MS will "consult" with the 100 or so
vendors, pluck their brains for the best ideas, then screw them.
A lot of utility companies filled holes in DOS, making a crappy
OS usable, (ex: 386MAX, QEMM). MS gladly accepted their "help",
then assimilated their market segment, leaving them struggling.
Same thing with networking, soon-to-be with browsers. Hey, why
not claim that word-processing and spreadsheets are part of the
OS? But I digress...
Companies offering ONLY middleware products COULD be put out of
business. In the case of Borland, their acquisition of Visigenics
could be made worthless, but at least Borland has something else
to sell, namely integrated development environments. |
