Ditto.
--
January 15, 2001
Power To The PC
Microsoft and others are betting that users want products
that combine the speed of local computing with new Web
services
By Aaron Ricadela
ike politics, the software business often makes for
strange bedfellows. Take Bill Gates, founder of
Microsoft, and Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes,
Microsoft's main competition in the corporate E-mail
market; these days, they're on the same side,
cheering the commercialization of peer-to-peer
computing.
It's a relationship born of mutual interest;
peer-to-peer computing requires powerful PCs that
are networked together. Is the fully loaded PC back
in style?
"There are a lot of neat things coming out of this
peer-to-peer model," Microsoft's chairman and chief
software architect said during his annual keynote
address to kick off the Comdex trade show last fall.
The technology, which lets any PC act as a server to
other users on a network, has given rise to
companies such as Gnutella, Napster, and Groove
Networks--the startup founded by Ozzie to provide
collaborative software that uses desktop computing
power to store files that teams of users can share
over the Web. But Groove's software isn't just about
file sharing, Ozzie said earlier this year: "This has big
implications for supply-chain management. Partners
in different companies will be able to work together
very closely and define what they want each other to
see."
Gates seems genuinely enthusiastic about
peer-to-peer computing. "Ray Ozzie is one of the
few people who doesn't work for Microsoft who Bill Gates truly respects,"
says industry veteran Sheldon Laube, CEO of small-business IT provider
CenterBeam Inc. and the first corporate customer of Notes when he headed
IT at the old Price Waterhouse 10 years ago. But beyond Gates' respect for
Ozzie, the application Ozzie's company is developing fits well with
Microsoft's fat-client architecture. "You can't run Napster or Groove on a
thin client," says Laube, whose company also has technical and financial ties
to Microsoft.
Microsoft couldn't agree more. "The trend is toward more intelligence on the
client--you can deliver a better experience," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
says. Maybe. Or perhaps, with leading software suppliers such as Oracle and
PeopleSoft Inc. rewriting their products as Web apps that circumvent
client-side protocols, Microsoft needs every argument it can muster to keep
software developers and customers interested in its desktop apps and
operating systems, which generate nearly 70% of its revenue.
To new versions of Windows and Office software for the desktop, the
company is working on adding Internet-based file storage, services that can
alert users' handheld computers or cell phones when an E-mail or page
arrives, and synchronization of data across devices. "Why are people going to
give up local processing and local storage unless there's some huge cost to
having it?" Ballmer says. "People should know the PC's an exciting device."
But while Microsoft is looking to keep the client-server architecture front and
center, companies such as IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems have been
evangelizing computing models that centralize intelligence on servers that talk
to a range of thin-client devices. Indeed, sluggish spending on PCs in the past
few months has clouded the outlook for revenue growth at Intel, Microsoft,
and other PC-centric companies.
Still, no one is suggesting the PC is going away any time soon. "The reality is,
you need both fat and thin clients," says John Wollman, senior VP of solutions
at Alliance Consulting. The company is working on projects with large online
retailers, financial-services companies, and online marketplaces to integrate
Groove's peer-to-peer application into browser-based software. "The
companies that are going to be successful in the future will figure out where to
put what," he says.
It's not just Microsoft, with its huge investment in PCs, that's banging the
smart-client drum. Others are betting that users want products combining the
convenience and speed of desktop computing with new Web services that
en-hance collaboration and E-commerce.
Groove's application is smart-client
savvy--it lets workers share files,
hold online discussions, manage
project calendars, draw on virtual
whiteboards, and browse the Web in
tandem. The software stores data on users' hard
drives, letting employees at different companies work
offline and sync up later to share files and calendars over the Net.
OpenDesign, Inc. backed by former Microsoft chief technology officer
Nathan Myhrvold, plans to start testing this quarter a development platform it
says will let companies quickly write peer-to-peer apps based on reusable
components. And Adobe Systems Inc. next month will begin beta testing
Adobe Studio, a hosted service that lets users share graphics files they've
created and stored on PCs over the Internet.
"People are coming back and saying a capable client isn't necessarily a bad
thing," says Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group.
O'Kelly, a former Groove staffer who recruited the developer's product
management team, says Microsoft and others are turning a criticism of
PCs--that hard drives and CPUs boost total cost of ownership--into an
asset. Linked via the Internet, "you're talking about beefy application servers
that happen to be PCs," he says. "With the right software, they can do
amazing things."
Why the renewed interest in corralling PC intelligence for business apps? For
companies using hosted Web applications, there's a growing dissatisfaction
with performance in that approach--according to Microsoft, at least. "The
vast preponderance of first-generation application service provider apps are
toast," says Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's director of business development.
"You can't do anything offline, and everything is a round trip to the server,
which is slow."
Some users disagree with that assessment. Jimmy Ledoux, a CPA for JPL
Information Services Inc. in New Orleans, uses Personable.com Inc., an
ASP, to access Intuit Inc.'s Quicken application as well as Microsoft Word
over a digital subscriber line connection. "As long as you have a good
connection, there's no reason to have stuff on a local drive," Ledoux says.
Microsoft says its first attempt to tackle the ASP market was flawed because
it failed to use the intelligence of client devices to provide the level of
performance users require. Ballmer calls Office Online, a terminal-server
version of the productivity suite launched last year, technology circa 1999, "a
thick server talking to a dumb client." The company's Office.Net release, still
years away, promises to use the Web to complement, rather than replace,
client apps. Features may include self-updates, authentication, and storage
services delivered over the Internet. "Software as a service or as a
subscription has to be in the customer's interest," Ballmer says.
That's what Adobe has in mind with Adobe Studio, a hosted service for PC
and Mac users at small design shops where it might make more sense to
share data over the Net than via LANs. Graphic designers who use Adobe
software such as Photoshop and Illustrator routinely create and move large
image files, enhanced documents, and video clips over networks, so they're
especially reliant on the processing and storage power of their PCs and
Macs, says Bryan Lamkin, senior VP of product marketing at Adobe. "Our
customers are fairly conservative because they're throwing around heavy
data," he says. But Adobe's betting there's a market for Web-based software
that lets users check files created on their hard drives into and out of its ASP
environment and manage the flow of those documents.
The PC-centric ASP service will allow Hillmancurtis.com, a Web design firm
in New York, to get rid of its secure file server. The firm--which designed
Adobe Studio's user interface--plans to use the software in-house to post
examples of work for customers, says Hillman Curtis, principal and chief
creative officer. Files are now backed up daily and saved to tape once a
week, and Hillmancurtis.com must E-mail server passwords to customers.
Feedback on projects filters in via E-mail to designers.
Features in Adobe Studio will let
Hillmancurtis.com post sample
work to an Adobe Web server,
where clients can view it. Curtis
will also be able to quickly
distribute changes proposed by
customers to a predefined group
of designers. "It's going to make managing a project a
lot easier. If you're a design firm using Adobe products, chances are you're
on a T1 or DSL line, which is just as fast as a file server in the back room,"
Curtis says.
In many respects, software developers have faced a choice during the past
five years: Develop browser-based applications optimized for easy
distribution and widespread deployment or write fast, robust desktop
software. Microsoft, to a large extent, created that trade-off, Fitzgerald says.
Tricky Windows problems such as conflicts among programs' installed
components led some developers to grow weary of the Windows platform.
Improvements in Windows 2000, including the ability to remotely distribute
desktop software across PC networks, could help bring defectors back.
Says Fitzgerald, "The end result is that people are going to run bigger and
more powerful applications on their client PCs." Read: They'll buy more
robust systems.
According to InformationWeek Research's Outlook For 2001 Study of 300
IT executives, more than 80% say PCs are a priority on their project lists for
this year. The news comes after some lean times. In December, Microsoft
issued its first profit warning since 1989. CFO John Connors guided down
earnings and revenue expectations for its second quarter ended Dec. 31 and
for fiscal year 2001 by about 5%, citing mainly sluggish demand for new PCs
among consumers, but also continued softness in IT spending. Even Ballmer
concedes "our market's not going to grow 30% a year" anymore.
Still, sales of Windows 2000 for the desktop look OK; during Microsoft's
first quarter ended Sept. 30, revenue rose nearly 13% to $1.88 billion.
Microsoft says Windows 2000 Professional accounts for about 30% of
32-bit operating-system sales, and in the Outlook For 2001 Study, more than
60% of executives say Windows 2000 desktop software is a priority.
Windows 2000 server software is, too, though Connors says those products
will take longer to catch on.
The recent downturn has given Oracle CEO Larry Ellison more ammunition
for his thin-client crusade. "The amazing thing about a PC is every PC in the
world is different," Ellison said recently. "What if you walked into a car dealer
and said, 'I want the Mercedes Benz with the Honda fuel-injection system
and the Cadillac air-conditioning system'? They'd think you'd gone nuts.
Everything is custom-made, and complexity is distributed into as many places
as possible."
Arguments such as those are winning converts. In the Outlook For 2001
Study, more than 60% of respondents cite network computers as a priority
for the year. PeopleSoft, which abandoned client-server architecture in
release 8 in favor of Internet thin-client technology, says Microsoft is merely
protecting its turf by touting the advantages of the fat-client model. "If
Microsoft thought anything else, they'd be out of business," says Simon Wells,
VP of strategy at PeopleSoft Consulting. There's no reason for client-side
logic, he says. Once users see how fluidly PeopleSoft 8 runs, "they're
excited."
Sean McCormack, VP of operations at consulting firm Crestone International
Inc., certainly was. Maintaining client software on the systems of 250
employees nationwide is a major headache, he says. "We really need what
their thin-client architecture gives us--the ability to apply fixes and upgrades
without having to upgrade software on the systems used in the field,"
McCormack says.
Thin clients have long promised cost-of-ownership efficiencies, yet advocates
of client-side processing say designing apps that take advantage of PCs'
power in unique ways may help companies save money, too. One thing
Internet veterans designing new software have learned from earlier
technology: Distributed computing counts.
"In a certain sense, clients are as
powerful as any other node on the
network," says Alex Cohen, chief
evangelist at OpenDesign. Cohen,
a former software architect at
Netscape (now a division of
America Online), says Netscape's
application server, online analytical
processing server, and other products were designed to run through browsers
that spoke only HTML, so they'd run on all types of clients without
modification. That, he says, was "one of the many fatal flaws of Netscape. A
browser is very limited--it really reduced the potential for innovative
applications."
Netscape, he says, "was forced to throw everything into the server side,"
necessitating big, centralized systems that were expensive to scale. "We were
just starting to develop powerful client applications, and everything started
moving toward a browser. In many ways, the Internet was a huge step
backward." OpenDesign will let developers build platform apps that are
inherently collaborative on the back end, distributing power among clients and
servers, and letting users access data over the Net without waiting for it to
flow through a server.
Andrew Mahon, Groove's director of strategic marketing, concurs that the
objective isn't "more efficient use of networks. It's people working better with
each other."
Applications of peer-to-peer networking fall into two main categories:
distributed processing, in which complex calculations are broken down into
smaller steps handled by peer computers on a network, and file-sharing, à la
Napster. Steve Mills, senior VP in charge of IBM's $13.5 billion software
division, doubts chaining together idle CPU cycles will prove worthwhile for
most businesses. More practical, he says, is the creation of peer relationships
among users at companies doing business online, which could allow more
efficient transactions. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel last summer launched
the Peer-to-Peer Working Group, which aims to standardize and
commercialize the technology.
However, one looming
concern about peer-to-peer
applications is security.
Potential customers wanted
to use Groove's app to add
instant messaging or Internet voice meetings to
existing partner portals. But Mahon says he had to
quell fears that outsiders would be reaching into employees' hard
drives--Groove's app lets users send each other files and Component Object
Model objects over the Internet via a central XML data store, without
directly tapping into the hard disks of employees involved in negotiations and
transactions.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft is positioning its .Net development strategy, which
will usher in an object-oriented programming environment for building Internet
apps, as complementary to peer-to-peer scenarios. It's a balancing act for
Microsoft, which must argue for running software on its platform, while
acknowledging that the industry is moving beyond Windows. "The .Net
framework is about building distributed computing applications," Fitzgerald
says. "In a lot of ways, the distinction between clients and servers goes
away."
The distinction between desktop operating systems and online services could
become murkier at Microsoft, too. The word "platform" no longer refers just
to Windows around Redmond, Wash., says Microsoft senior researcher Eric
Horvitz. It could refer to code running "in the cloud"--off the PC, on the
Web, and capable of communicating with back-end software. "This whole
idea of what stays local, what sits on big iron, and what gets pushed across
devices is an incredible technical and intellectual challenge," Horvitz says.
Microsoft's independent software developers are part of the process. The
launches of Windows 2000 and .Net featured demonstrations by Alibre Inc.,
whose CEO, Paul Grayson, also founded Micrografx Inc., an influential
Windows vendor in the 1980s and '90s. Alibre's Design app, which it rents
over the Web, lets engineers collaborate on design drawings and component
purchasing. The software's 3-D modeling and data management servers
reside centrally and on a user's PC. That speeds performance because
graphics files don't need to be constantly updated over the Web and users
can work offline.
"It's remarkably similar to what Microsoft is saying is the future of software,"
says Greg Milliken, VP of marketing at Alibre, which inked a
multimillion-dollar contract with General Electric Co. last fall. If such
applications portend the future, there may be gas left in the PC yet. --with
Steve Konicki and Jennifer Maselli |
