Reading the Longhorn SDK
docs is a disorienting experience. Everything's familiar but
different. Consider these three examples:
[Full story: Replace
and defend via Jon's Radio]
"Replace & Defend" is
certainly a strategy that would have awakened the entire non
Microsoft Developer world during the recent PDC event. I know these
events are all about preaching to the choir (Windows only
developers), but as someone who has worked with Microsoft
technologies as an ISV since the late 80's there is something about
this events announcements that leave me concerned.
Ironically these concerns
aren't about the competitive aspects of their technology
disruptions, but more along the lines of howMicrosoft (I hope
inadvertently) generates the kinds of sentiments echoed in the
comments
thread from Scobles
recent "How to hate
Microsoft" post. As indicated in my response to this
post,I don't believeMicrosoft is as bad or evil as is
instinctively assumed in many quarters, but I can certainly
understand why theyare hated by others which is really
unfortunate, especiallybearing in mind that they have done
more good than harmto date(in my
humbleopinion).
Anyway, back to my concerns
post PDC which I break down as follows:
-
Disruptive assaults on existing
standards with the only benefit being Microsoft platform
centricity.
Jon Udell
addressed this in his "Replace and Defend" post (which kicked
of this post), and I see exactly what he sees here, and I don't see
any reason for this approach whatsoever. Even if one of these
standards was deficient what stops theMicrosoft from
addressing these deficiencies, and then should the W3C's standards
acceptance and ratification process bogs things down at least let
the industry know you gave it openness a chancebut have to
move on etc..
-
Gradual obsolescence of existing
Microsoft standards which used to provide interfaces for 3rd party
ISV partners, and replacing these with totally closed
infrastructure implementations that bind to Microsoft products
only. A good example is
WinFS, I believe in the unified data storage concept,
it's a
vision that I've believed in formany years, but there is
no notionfrom any PDC presentation or Blog that I
haveread so far (I aggregatea serious number of
feeds)that Microsoft is committed to an architectural
strategy that enables 3rd party ISVs to hook their data stores and
data sources into this storage infrastructure -it's simply
about
Yukon
(SQL Server) and that's basically it.
WinFS needs to architecturally
separate the System Provider from the Data
Provider (pretty much the OLE-DB architecture)with
Microsoftnaturally providing reference System Provider
(pretty much what was demonstrated at PDC)and Data Provider
(ADO.NET, OLE DB, and ODBC) implementations. Third parties can
choose to produce custom WinFS Service or Data Providers which
serve their data access needs. It's impractical to want to force
every non SQL Server customer over to SQL Server in order them to
exploit WinFS, and I certainly hope this isn't the definitive
strategy at Microsoft.