“Microsoft.Net can be summarized in one simple statement: Microsoft is building an Internet monopoly“, Gary Hein from C|Net, writes. “It’s unquestionable that .Net integration will simplify the Internet experience for millions of users. But at what cost? As a society, are we willing to cede control of the Internet to Microsoft for the sake of usability and convenience? Success is far from guaranteed, but Microsoft will do everything in its power to win. Our eternal vigilance is the only barrier between Microsoft and its next monopoly.”
Editorial About .Net Preaches That a New Monopoly is Born
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
sigh… what a bunch of shit.
“Microsoft is a late entrant into this market”
Bullshit. Microsoft helped develop SOAP, UDDI and XSD – three of the four technologies that serve as the basis of Web Services.
If anyone is a late entrant, it’s Sun…
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2681805,00.html
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/01/15/010115hnbrazil.xm…
This guy says that Windows “has yet to gain significant mind share within the Internet”, but earlier in the same article he’s talking about how Microsoft “governs how over 96 percent of people access the Internet.” Yeah okay. I don’t know what specifically he’s referring to when he says Windows doesn’t have significant mind share, but I’d say that millions of Windows developers and over a quarter of the web running on Windows servers is something significant.
Here’s another gem… “Microsoft is also creating ill will among developers by abandoning Java (and millions of Java developers) and artificially limiting Visual Studio.Net to Windows.”
If he’s referring to Microsoft not continuing development with their JVM, that was Sun’s call when they sued them, not Microsoft’s.
Java will run on .NET, as will a bunch of other languages. Visual Studio runs on Windows and always has… that’s not anything new. I don’t see why this is all of a sudden creating all this “ill will”.
.Net, on the other hand, is going to be on other platforms and you can thank Microsoft for that. They are standardizing the core of the framework and the C# language for anyone to use. They’re providing a shared source version that will run on other OSes, and the open source Mono will provide further support for .Net outside of Windows. (And totally outside of Microsoft’s control.)
The killer thing for me is this whole shit about Passport and how it’s the end of the world. “For .Net to succeed beyond Web services, Passport and HailStorm must…” blah blah blah… as if Microsoft’s success depended on Passport. Who says Microsoft doesn’t succeed if Passport doesn’t take off? They’re still selling the software that powers these web services (servers, development tools, etc.). And this software can interoperate with ANYONE’s authentication Web service, not just Passport.
.Net is a boon to developers on any platform as it stands right now. Yes, Hailstorm will come, but there will be aggressive competitors to Hailstorm (the biggest announced so far will be AOL/Time Warner and Sun). Don’t make the mistake of confusing Microsoft’s Hailstorm initiative with the .Net framework; Hailstorm depends on .Net, but you don’t need Hailstorm for .Net at all.
Microsoft’s biggest problem with .Net (besides the stupid name with the period in it, and the fact they want to call everything “.Net this” and “.Net that”) is the fact that it’s a developer technology, and a lot of people (like this analyst) just don’t understand it because they’re not developers. .Net also encompasses a lot of things, making it a big thing to grasp even for people who do code for a living. Although things have gotten a little better with the beta releases of the .Net framework, there’s still a lot of misinformation and confusion out there thanks to ignorant analysts like this guy playing on people’s fears.
Inform yourself… read up on the technology, check out Mono, etc… don’t take someone’s word for it, see for yourself.
Sadly due to their desktop monopoly M$ decides where the internet is going. They destroyed more good technology than anyone can imagine. Sad, sad, very sad… Now they are going to leave out Java, chance are this will give Sun a serious blow. Better a crippled and non platform independent Java on Windows than no Java at all. There are millions of Java developers, this is a kick in the balls for them also.
I remember when Direct X just came out, people said everybody use Opengl
Microsoft will fail with Direct X…. Watch where direct X is now… If a
technology is better people will move to it. Even if this people are using
another technology before. By the way the use of M$ is really childish …
One has to look at the whole picture that is occuring here. With MS .Net, Passport, Hailsotrm, Desktop control, IIS servers, CRM initatives (Commerce Server), analytics, click stream analysis…, MS will know pretty much everything there is about a consumer when they interact with their PC and the Internet. They will know which sites you visit, what you buy, who you chat with, how long you visit a site, what applications you have, everything. With that knowledge, they can target you and possibly share that information to other marketing firms (though currently they say they wont). Before, all this information existed on various servers at different companies, But when they are all lumped together at one company that controls both the desktop, large percentage of servers, plus many of the protocols, the consumer has now become the fly in MS’s web. MS will most likely take much of the AOL market away too. BTW, I am not a fan of AOL either. An integrated Internet would be a nice place to visit. But with big brother controlling all aspecits of your on-line habits, be very scared in how that information will be used. Be even more scared if MS and AOL team up.
That’s why it’s so damn important for free software to catch up into this area…
If you like it or not, EVERY company will do if they have the chance.
Come on! Everybody liked Microsoft when it was small…
You can’t trust any proprietory software company.
That’s why we need things like open standards, free implementations, secured freedom (GPL) and stuff like that.
Another reason why .GNU and Mono are VERY VERY important.
If they wouldn’t do it, Microsoft could do what they want. Free software HAS to break the monopoly. Don’t expect any other company to do it for you.
Besides of Apple and AOL, I doubt that anybody would have the power to do so.
And would you trust Apple or AOL?
That’s why I support almost everything that’s free, even if I think it sucks.
I don’t have to use it. If there are free standards and implementations, you would still be able to develop and use proprietory software. There are just some things that should definetly not be proprietory, like file formats, protocols, operating systems…
Has anyone read George Orwell’s ‘1984’?
/*
mauerj (IP: —.microsoft.com) wrote on 2001-08-30 20:05:41:
Here’s another gem… “Microsoft is also creating ill will among developers by abandoning Java (and millions of Java developers) and artificially limiting Visual Studio.Net to Windows.”
If he’s referring to Microsoft not continuing development with their JVM, that was Sun’s call when they sued them, not Microsoft’s.
*/
Well, if that microscum.com ….. errm microsoft.com than you behaviour is more than obvious.
It is not really SUNs fault that M$ is not longer allowed to continue MJVM, it was totaly M$ fault, as they want to polute it.
Java is one of the biggest fears of M$ as it(Java) is really plattform independent.
.Net is Windows, even if other plattforms are “supported” in the longrun, .Net is Winscum……
LoCal
<flame>
Microsoft haters are a great source of amusement. If it wasn’t for Microsoft most of them would still be writing “hello world”… come to think of it most of them still ARE writing “hello world” apps…
</flame>
.NET is a great idea. Mono (and other similar open projects) are a testament to this. If I can one day run MS Office / Visual Studio on Linux / BSD / Whatever I will be a very happy fish indeed. No longer will I have to listen to people whine about the crappy linux productivity apps – they can just run MS apps regardless of the system.
I don’t think I will mourn Java, I went and learned C++ and got a life instead.
Just my 2c.
For those who believe that “if it wasn’t for Micro$oft” propaganda need your heads examined. Obviously Micro$oft must be sending you bull$hit drugs with their latest products so you can believe all that bull$hit they keep feeding you!
Like Scot Hacker said in his last and most interesting article at Byte.com… “There is life beyond Windows” and I am enjoying every minute of it!!!
> Everybody liked Microsoft when it was small…
No they did not, why MS wsa small they shat on the hackers.
n.b. the hackers of the time (i.e. funky people) not moden day ‘31337’ w@nk3rs.
Ok, a real cross-platform development environment is cool. That is what .Net may well become. The Java issue is both Microsoft’s AND Sun’s fault. MS wanted Java to be more Windows-centric, Sun (rightly) sued; BUT Sun also refuses o submit Java to any of the standards bodies (ECMA, ANSI, ISO, W3C, etc…) because they want total control over it. So, Java had kind of a slow start but it still sucks that MS is trying to “wish Java away” just because they can’t have it their way, though. Truthfully, I believe that .Net, C#, etc.. is MS’ attempt at taking on Java and trying to do one better. They have already borrowed a few ideas from Java and many other projects and are combining them into an existing, usable whole that will be there and supported REAL SOON NOW for the dominant desktop platform. They also have the benefit of learning from their own and others’ mistakes (I hope). Supposedly, C# has already been submitted to at least one formal standards body so they have Sun beat there. According to MS, it could be the best of all worlds of cross-platform development, if MS delivers and doesn’t try to shut people out. On the other hand, I don’t want to see Java go away entirely because it’s good competition and is HERE NOW and working.
As for the HailStorm initiatives, I have two scenarios in mind:
Worst (possible) Case: Microsoft leverages their .Net/HailStorm/Passport technology and monopolistic might to become a giant global clearinghouse for internet security and forces everyone to use bug-ridden Windows .Net on inefficient Intel hardware. Code Red .Net version IX takes everything down all at once. bye bye.
Best (possible) Case: Microsoft attempts to make up for decades of negative geek karma by completely documenting and opening the .Net/HS/Pp protocols and mechanisms allowing for competing versions with the same functionality and maybe more. They then submit it all to public standards bodies and you start seeing it in RFC’s. MS succeeds with .Net, etc.. but it is one of many web application service platforms along with Java, Mozilla (trust me, it’s big enough to be a platform all its own), etc…
What behavior would that be, LoCal… the fact that I’m not just slinging shit like you are? I’ll take that as a compliment.
My personal opinion here is just that; I do not represent Microsoft or speak on their behalf here. I’m here because I used to follow BeNews and was led to OSAlert as a result of Eugenia taking over the helm (who I think is doing a great job so far). I also hope to engage in some intelligent discussion here at some point.
I’ve developed for the Mac, the Newton, and BeOS in the past (see http://www.bebits.com/app/242 for an example), but my development career has prospered on Microsoft technologies. That fact, and the fact that the .NET Framework is the best thing I’ve seen for developers come down the pipe in a long time, is a big reason why I started working for Microsoft.
But enough about me. Let’s get back to the point.
If you buy into Sun’s “write once run everywhere” hype about Java, your opinion about who’s to blame for Microsoft’s Java abandonment doesn’t surprise me. Regardless of fault, Java is not as threatening to Microsoft as you believe. AOL is, so is Linux, but Java just hasn’t lived up to the hype.
Sun’s broken a lot of promises with Java and it remains a proprietary technology to this day. The market is getting sick of proprietary bullshit and the call is out for real open standards. Microsoft is providing it with .NET. Java isn’t.
mauerj has overdosed on the bull$hit drugs Micro$oft has been feeding him and will have to seek rehabilitation. This should take about a year and careful examination and counseling is required before he will be well again. Please send get well cards and such during his time of healing, thank you
Like I said, CattBeMac, I was hoping to engage in some intelligent discussion. I’m skeptical if your comments are any indication.
I didn’t have to post from within Microsoft’s subnet, but I did. One reason was to see who are here to discuss and inform versus those who are here to sling shit. You stand out as one of the latter.
Show some respect to the others who frequent this site and stop wasting people’s time with this childish bullshit.
My last post was more of sarcastic humor and no pun was intended! I would converse in intelligent conversation, but this Pro-Microsoft -vs- Anti-Microsoft usually never get anywhere even though I don’t mind trading knowledge, experience and learning something new. But one thing I cannot stand is the arrogance of Pro-Microsoft Evangelists who see Microsoft as the only hope to the survival of the computer industry when there are so many other players out there innovating and producing just as good (if not better) solutions. But people get blinded by Microsoft and only think Microsoft is an innovator while everyone else sits back and watches.
I’m not sure what part of the industry you work in, but the area I work in Microsoft is not taken very seriously for the solutions we use or require to do our job and I have worked with various companies and the solutions I work with now are the same solutions I worked with at my last company and the company before that!
The bottom line here is that you are bias as well as I am and probably has been influenced from our past experience with the above mentioned and I doubt that will ever change regardless of what we say or do!
Rest easy, CattBeMac… I’m not one of the evangelists.
mauerj wrote:
“The market is getting sick of proprietary bullshit and the call is out for real open standards. Microsoft is providing it with .NET”
Heh, in a way I could almost admire you for writing “open standards” and “Microsoft” so close to each other. How many clearings did that take? Are you a Thetan already?
But then, the term “open standard” has been used by many organizations with many different meanings…
I’m not familiar with too many .NET details. If “open standard” means something different from “we let some dimwit port this to Linux to disguise our intention to monopolize yet another area of computing” then explain it to me, please…
mauerj wrote:
> The market is getting sick of proprietary bullshit and the call is out
> for real open standards. Microsoft is providing it with .NET. Java isn’t.
Since when has Microsoft ever been a true proponent of “open standards”? Sure they talk about them a lot, but all of the instances I remember of Microsoft using a standard involve Microsoft’s “innovation” that makes their implmentation incompatible with others in some way.
What I meant by “open standard” was “publicly documented and available to everyone”. You could read that as “not controlled by a single company, i.e. Microsoft” if you like.
Microsoft, HP, and Intel are jointly submitting specs for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and C# to ECMA for standardization.
The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is core for the .NET Framework; it includes the common type system and the internals for managed code. The CLI is what provides a lot of the benefits of .NET like language interoperability.
Here’s more info on the standardization…
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/
http://developer.intel.com/software/idap/ecma/
http://devresource.hp.com/devresource/Docs/TechPapers/CLIandCSharp/…
It’s cool that they are standardizing C# as well; I think it’s a good language from what I’ve played with so for. But the big news as far as the ECMA standardization goes is the CLI portion.
The CLI is what allows you to choose your language with .NET, as opposed to the JVM where you have to use Java. One language I like a lot is Python, and you’ll be able to program in Python with .NET (see http://www.activestate.com for Python and Perl under .NET). I’ve even seen an example of an ASP.NET page done in COBOL, believe it or not.
The CLI will also facilitate the ability to run applications on multiple platforms. If everything with Mono goes well, you could take an application built with Visual Studio on Windows and run it using Mono’s CLR on Linux. That doesn’t mean that Windows-specific features like COM+ are going to be available on Linux, but that there’s a common baseline to target between them. It works the other way as well; Mono is planning on supporting Bonobo within their .NET implementation, for example.
Like I was saying before, all this .NET stuff is confusing because there’s a lot to it and it’s a lot of programming-related information. Microsoft is going to be pushing their own Web services (Hailstorm) to sell to people, and it will be built upon the .NET Framework, but the .NET Framework does not depend on Hailstorm at all. Standardizing the CLI guarantees that. Adopting the CLI does not mean you are now stuck with Passport, etc.
Even if you’re a 100% dyed-in-the-wool Linux developer, I would encourage you to check out the .NET Framework… it holds a lot of benefits for developers regardless of platform. Take a look at Mono at http://www.go-mono.com/ . They’ve been making great progress in implementing an open source implementation of the .NET Framework (in fact, they just announced they’ve got the standard “Hello World” app running on their CLR). With more support like this, people will end up forgetting the CLI originally came from Microsoft (as they have with C++ and AT&T).
maurj wrote:
> What I meant by “open standard” was “publicly documented and available to
> everyone”. You could read that as “not controlled by a single company, i.e.
> Microsoft” if you like.
Microsoft is not known for implementing standards very faithfully, even those that they help create. Why should we trust that they’ll not tinker with their implementations of these standards to block out competitors or even more insidious, incorporate patented technology that excludes everyone else from being able to implement the full standard? It’s all well and good to have standards, but Microsoft doesn’t have anyone’s trust and that’s much more important than the standard itself.
Michael Grinder wrote:
> Since when has Microsoft ever been a true proponent of “open standards”?
My personal opinion is that they started walking the walk when someone hit them over the head with XML. Microsoft’s been preaching things like “Universal Data Access” and have tried many times to do it with proprietary solutions like OLEDB, and here comes along this simple standard that does it way better. Not only is it a good solution, but it has broad industry support and adoption because it’s standardized, something you just can’t get with proprietary initiatives.
This may also coincide with computers reaching the point that normal people pay attention to them now. The computer industry is a common topic in news today and people are much more aware of what goes on. Maybe as a result of Microsoft trying to figure out how to be relevant in the Internet age they realized that embracing open standards was the ticket.
I still like to think that it was XML though, because XML is cool.
> Sure they talk about them a lot, but all of the instances I remember of Microsoft using a standard involve Microsoft’s “innovation” that makes their implmentation incompatible with others in some way.
That depends on how you look at standards. If you look at it as a directive that you must follow and can do no more or no less, than yes, Microsoft has been incompatible with a lot of standards. But then there’s no point in having a standard, because everyone’s software has to be exactly the same; there’s no ability to make a better mouse trap.
But if you look at standards as a contract that says “I will meet this specification”, but not holding you back from doing MORE than the standard defines, then I think Microsoft has been pretty decent about standards.
Let’s look at CSS for example. They’ve improved their support for CSS in every release of IE since IE3, going from a pretty crappy implementation to something that today is very compliant. They also support additional functionality like dynamic expressions within CSS. Someone following the CSS standard will still get the functionality they expect, but they have IE-specific features they can take advantage of if they so choose.
The Constitution provides a standard for rights in the US; any rights not explicitly granted to you are still available to you… you don’t lose them by omission. They didn’t throw the Wright Brothers in jail when they flew for the first time just because the Constitution didn’t mention anything about people having the right to fly.
That’s the way a standard should be.
Michael Grinder wrote:
> Microsoft is not known for implementing standards very faithfully, even those that they help create.
Read my earlier post for my opinion on that.
> Why should we trust that they’ll not tinker with their implementations of these standards to block out competitors or even more insidious, incorporate patented technology that excludes everyone else from being able to implement the full standard?
Well as far as the .NET Framework is concerned, Mono’s FAQ answers that question pretty well.
from http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html …
Do you fear that Microsoft will change the spec and render Mono useless?
No. Microsoft proved with the CLI and the C# language that it was possible to create a powerful foundation for many languages to interoperate. We will always have that.
Even if changes happened in the platform which were undocumented (which is very unlikely), the existing platform has a value on its own.
> It’s all well and good to have standards, but Microsoft doesn’t have anyone’s trust and that’s much more important than the standard itself.
I’m not asking you to trust them. You don’t need to trust them to take advantage of the .NET Framework. It’s out of Microsoft’s hands now. It’s good technology and you can benefit from it without sending Microsoft a penny.
Just a question mauerji, are you obsessed with the word “childish”?
Well, I thought I’d never see an intelligent (mostly) discussion about Microsoft – So I think I’ll join in today.
Passport, Hailstorm etc. – they’re all irrelevant in the scheme of things, not one of them really matters to Microsoft. None of those pose a threat to what is destined to become a new monopoly.
.Net is a really meaty issue, yet the fools at the DOJ seem more concerned with the mear Browser war that led to MS bundling IE with Windows. Well now IE can be removed – the DOJ has won what they set out to do. Despite what you hear that’s all the DOJ was concerned about. The public got wind of how MS sought and destroyed netscape’s unrivaled Navigator – using what can be commented as anti-competetive practices, so the DOJ stands up proud “don’t worry folks, we won’t let that go by” – and they haven’t. They have won their battle, a pointless battle! – Had the DOJ chosen another issue, say the Secret OEM Licenese which prohibits the use of any bootloader by the OEM other than the Microsoft Boot Loader which when linked to the Boot Loader License, prohibits the boot loader being used with any operating system other than those created and owned by Microsoft. Had the DOJ chosen that route then who knows, maybe it would all be over right now. Maybe BeOS would still be “alive”, maybe Microsoft would be two companies, maybe we’d finally have the choice of what OS to use. But no, the public does not know about BeOS unlike Netscape which the public is all too aware of. The DOJ has won it’s case, but not the case of the public!
.NET is a fantastic concept, platform independance, with the right pushing .NET will revolutionise the industry. The problem is though, it will, at the same time, monopolise the industry in yet another way.
For years Microsoft has controled the users, now with .NET they seek to control the developers.
Microsoft know something that we have not keyed on to yet. Windows, is destined to fall! – BeOS had the potential, Linux has the potential – if either one of those got serious funding by a company who aims to compete with Microsoft then god help Microsoft. To remain the dominator it is today Microsoft needs to seek and dominate at the root, the developers! If Windows is to fall, then .NET will be there. .NET is in essence a platform that runs on another platform, so .NET will be run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and, who knows maybe even BeOS
– So if Windows fell, one of the other two (or three 
) would then be the leader, and Microsoft would have a root extending into them via .NET so Windows’ falling would in fact be of little effect or relevance to Microsoft.
Another possibility is that Microsoft is seeking to dominate the enitre industry. With the user area dominated, that only leaves the developer.
Users use what the developers develop for. Developers develop for what the users use.
If Microsoft controls both of those then they have in effect a true Monopoly!
In the long run, the user is going to lose out! In the long run the developer is going to lose out. In the long run, Microsoft will WIN!