Microsoft Peeks Into the Future of Software
Company's chief executive says packages apps are a thing of the past,
and XML is a sign of things to come.
Matt Berger, IDG News Service
Friday, June 22, 2001
Microsoft has seen the future of software, and it is not sitting on a
CD.
Speaking about the software giant's new vision for building and
delivering its products, Microsoft's Chief Executive Office Steve Ballmer
attempted to explain why his company's .Net initiative will push software
toward this future.
Software will no longer be packaged and sold to customers on a CD, and
applications will no longer be static programs that sit on a desktop or run off
of a server, Ballmer said during a speech Thursday at the InfoWorld CTO Forum
here. Instead, he said, they will be delivered over the Internet as services
that allow customers to interact with them dynamically.
"The concept of giving someone software on a CD will go away," Ballmer
said. The Internet, open standards such as extensible markup language (XML) and
the company's own .Net infrastructure will offer a way of delivering software
over the Internet, he said.
Using many of the same phrases from earlier presentations on the
subject, Ballmer called XML the "lingua franca of the Internet," saying it will
drive the evolution of the Internet and Web services.
"This is the XML Revolution," he said.『I think this will be as big or
even bigger than any revolution that preceded it.』
This is why XML lies at the heart of Microsoft's .Net
initiative, Ballmer said. He added that Microsoft has begun to
incorporate support for XML in every part of its product line, from servers to
desktop software to development tools, and the company is trying to convince
partners, customers, and developers to do the same.
It signals a new strategy from Microsoft that it is betting all of its
chips on XML as the standard for developing its software to deliver new
applications and Web services, said Steve Jurvetson, managing director of
Silicon Valley venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who attended the event
here.
Microsoft's decision to embrace XML, as well as support from other
parts of the software industry, will pay off in the long run, said Tim Bray,
the co-inventor of XML, who attended the CTO Forum as a representative of his
new company Antarcti.ca Systems.
Despite Microsoft's adoption of XML, which is an open standard, the
company's .Net inititative remains a proprietary platform that Microsoft
continues to market to potential customers.
"Obviously there is genuine caution in the industry about Microsoft
trying to establish a strong hold on Web servers and the Internet," Bray said.
"We shouldn't be too paranoid, but it's not to say that it won't happen."
XML is built into Microsoft's forthcoming Windows
XP operating system. The latest release of its Office
productivity suite, Office
XP, also incorporates hints of how Microsoft plans to use XML,
such as its Smart Tags function, which delivers information from the Web via
hyperlinks within applications.
The company has also made XML an integral part of its Visual Studio.Net
developer products and the .Net Framework. Microsoft delivered beta 2 versions
of both of those products to developers this week at its TechEd conference in
Atlanta.
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