Falling into the "Duh" category, Bill Gates tells the Financial Times he's all about open Web standards. Everyone knows open standards are the foundation of a robust market, but what he is talking about isn't precisely open, as this statement from the press release confirms: "By using mobile Web services, developers can create more compelling user experiences that allow PC-based applications to take advantage of services formerly reserved for mobile devices, such as mobile messaging, location, billing and authentication. (Emphasis added)"
Translation: We're going to drive a lot of .NET server cycles with this stuff.
It's actually very important to note and an important turning point for Microsoft to see the Chairman saying positive things about open standards. The truth, though, is that standards are highly politicized and there is a long semantic path between talking about "open" standards and implementing them in such a way that vendors can swap out layers of technology from different vendors interchangeably, which is the practical meaning of "open" in the standards world. Here are some key quotes come from the FT interview (with my editorial comments in bold brackets):
The announcement with Vodafone today is actually about standards. Its not a particular design win for Microsoft [ Only true if you discount the value of a leading carrier adopting .NET-based Web services -- pretty disingenuous.]. ...So we sat and talked and said well why don't we come up with specific web service definitions, that are just open, so it's clear to application people like say your AA service provider, who wants to do what we saw on the screen demonstration there. To write what we saw - there's a day's work, literally - because you're connecting up to standard web services and so there'll be what we announced today. Any wireless ( news -web sites ) operator can be a part of it, including Vodafone's competitors.
Any software firm can be part of it, including people who compete with Microsoft. So IBM could build toolkits for this stuff on top of their web services platform that they call websphere (sic) ["On top" is the operative phrase -- it's .NET underneath].
So we have a great relationship with Vodafone, but the news today is about a standards initiative, not about us, MS service or MS device or even a MS backend [It is about MS data formats]. The fact is they're so committed to using web services and we've bet our lives on them. It will facilitate a lot of the joint work we're doing.
Note, however that the situation he is describing is "open" in terms of Microsoft's partner, Vodaphone, being open to letting other carriers access the .NET-based services they are creating. Bill Gates went on to say "There are one or two companies that are building that mobile software stack for the future and we expect to get a significant share of that." Only one or two? Good god, what a narrow view of what's going on. That's got to be news to 30 companies I can think of off the top of my head.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 14, 2003 10:01 AM | TrackBack