Microsoft charges into web services
- Article 26 of 77
- Information Age, December 2001
Will Microsoft's 'embrace-and-extend' strategy work with the open standards of web services, and will developers trust the company?
Microsoft may have conquered the desktop software market and made major inroads into server territory, but the company now has a new target in its sights: Internet applications and, by extension, 'web services'.
With the progressive roll-out of its .Net Framework, an array of software development tools for creating and delivering applications and services that run over the Internet, the company is trying to leapfrog Java – and its related band of technologies – as the industry's primary development and deployment environment.
Undoubtedly organisations will buy into this strategy, say many analysts, but not to the exclusion of Java – and not for some time, as early elements of .Net are only now appearing. Today, Microsoft's main programming suite is Visual Studio, a collection of integrated development environments that includes Visual Basic, J++ (Java) and Visual C++. The next release of the suite, Visual Studio .Net (to be launched in February 2002), extends the package into web services and includes Microsoft's new development language, C# (C sharp), which can be used to build XML web services and other Internet-centric applications.
Microsoft claims C# will deliver significant development efficiencies. As a provocative marketing exercise, the company commissioned an independent development organisation to re-write Oracle and Sun's Java demonstration program into C#. “They were able to build it in a third of the code,” says Mark Greatorex of Microsoft's .Net Developer Group.
While extending Visual Studio, Microsoft also intends to add .Net capabilities to the application server technologies it ships with Windows 2000 – namely, Internet Information Server, Active Server Pages and Microsoft Transaction Server, due to ship in 2002.
There is one major drawback to the approach. .Net is Microsoft-specific: web services created through it will only be deployable on Windows servers. Given Microsoft's muscle and the promised capabilities of the new version of Visual Studio, however, .Net is sure to win a sizeable part of the web services market.