Weekly Review: Is Microsoft Making the Grade?

You wouldn't imagine a man like Bill Gates is someone who's used to getting C grades. Despite having dropped out of college before taking his finals (he was too impatient to set up Microsoft with his high school buddy Paul Allen), it seems unlikely his school report card was besmirched with anything lower than an A- or at worst a B+.

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"Gates announced Microsoft had scraped C grades in developing building block services as well as in providing software as a service. Some in the room felt that even awarding Cs was generous, considering the results it has been turning in over recent semesters." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

So it was a telling move when he awarded his company a C last week for its performance on Web services since the launch of its .Net strategy in June 2000. True, there were a couple of As on the report card, too, but one of them was for cheerleading, which may be a tough job to do well but hardly qualifies as academically challenging, even if you do dress up the course description as "XML evangelism."

The other A was for tools, but then that's a field where Microsoft seems to be naturally gifted. Delivering its Visual Studio .Net development tools in February was an achievement that earned it top marks from developers, but it was a triumph that had been widely anticipated.

How Did Classmates Fare?
It's when you look at the Cs, that you can begin to see why Microsoft still has a lot of work to do — although to be fair, its classmates, including Oracle and Sun, have been finding the Web services syllabus equally tough, and formerly highly rated scholar HP, who'd shown early promise, surprised everyone by actually flunking out of the course a couple of weeks ago (see HP Scraps Netaction Software Suite).

Gates announced Microsoft had scraped C grades in developing building block services as well as in providing software as a service. As the core modules of the Web services syllabus, scoring low marks on both of them counts as a pretty dismal showing, particularly when you look back at the enthusiasm with which Gates announced Microsoft's arrival on the course two years ago (see Microsoft Maps Out a Net-Centric Future). Some in the room felt that even awarding Cs was generous, considering the results it has been turning in over recent semesters.

Earlier this year, they recalled, Microsoft ripped up the Hailstorm project (later renamed .Net My Services), which it had been planning to hand in as its coursework for the building block services module. As for software as a service, there had been high hopes for the company's Exchange program, but many were bemused by its choice of Fargo, North Dakota (headquarters of its Great Plains subsidiary) as a summer school destination. Its recent decision to add a European dimension with the acquisition of Copenhagen-based Navision shows a willingness to explore new angles, but has yet to prove its worth.

Incomplete Grade for Two Classes
On the two remaining course modules, Microsoft hasn't even done enough work to merit any grade at all. The most important of the two incomplete modules is federation, where Microsoft inexplicably failed to attend any of the classes on trust and security until a sudden change of heart early this year turned it into a model student, albeit at great personal cost (see Microsoft Spent $100M on Trustworthy Computing).

The other incomplete grade is for "transformative user experiences," an experimental module where students are encouraged to cannibalize their existing proprietary desktop software products in favor of a standardized, component-based, peer-to-peer Web services alternative. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's progress on this module has been tardy, to say the least.

But Gates was quick to point out that the Web services curriculum had always been envisaged as a full five- to six-year course, and that underperformance at this stage in the learning process can still be made up later on. Furthermore, this is no ordinary school certificate we are talking about. Likening the complete six-year endeavor as on par with putting man on the Moon, or creating the Boeing 747, Gates made it clear that, in his view, the final results will go down in history. In particular, he noted that thousands of formerly high-paid software consultants would be forced to embark on retraining courses of their own once Web services have their predicted effect of lowering the costs of developing applications and services by as much as a hundredfold.

Gates concluded by promising that Microsoft would now embark on actually building the infrastructure needed to support Web services, and finished by revealing his own definition of .Net, one that he repeated three times in quick succession in order to make up for not making it clear over the past two years since first announcing the strategy: ".Net is software to connect information, people, systems and devices," he explained.

Industry Still Has to Make the Grade
It would be difficult to fault Gates definition, although in some ways its sheer scope merely shows up the extent to which either Microsoft or any of its classmates have so far failed to measure up to the task. In his choice of words, Gates has made it absolutely clear that in his view, Web services are not merely a new way of linking applications to each other. They make up a much more all-encompassing framework for linking applications, content and users in a seamless end-to-end process.

With such an ambitious objective, perhaps the school governors should give some thought to extending the six-year deadline for completing the course. Nobody wants to see a graduation from a task of such magnitude where the best grade awarded is a C. This is one class where all of us will be counting on the participants achieving A-grade results.

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