Hailstorm Article "Claptrap"

We received this strong rebuke from Windows 2000 Mag news editor Paul Therrott to Kurt Cagle's perspective on Hailstorm. A good read.

To whom it may concern,

How could you publish the claptrap at the following URL? http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/06/05/cagle.html

Have you no standards? Every point this guy makes is incorrect. Every single one. Let's take a look:

1. Microsoft has never had much success with creating a paid service.

Unless of course, you consider a decade of constant upgrades to Windows and Office a paid service, in which case it becomes the most successful paid services company in the history of the planet earth. Besides, past failure does not equate to future failure (the reverse is also true). Microsoft is often successful after repeated failures in a given market. There are many examples.

2. With Windows, if you wanted to write applications, you had no choice but to write to the Windows APIs.

This is true of any platform, no?

Vendors that produced third-party products had to cooperate with Microsoft to stay on top of the latest changes in the OS or risk having products that would die on the next upgrade.

Ditto.

Indeed, one of the ways that Microsoft leveraged its OS was to keep critical APIs evolving internally until fairly late in the cycle, giving its developers an automatic window of opportunity of several months to develop into a new niche before a competitor could.

This is not true. Microsoft opens up the APIs very early in the development cycle; thus the Platform SDK for Windows with every Beta 1 release, and updates all along the way. It's fantastical to accuse Microsoft of withholding APIs: The distribution of code to developers is one of the company's primary strengths.

The Internet, on the other hand, has a strong set of standards bodies that do not automatically bow before Microsoft and that have been working to keep the critical components of the Web as simple as possible. Given that these bodies are made up in great part from Microsoft's competitors, it is unlikely that they will cede the power to API, especially as Microsoft has a reputation for playing poorly in shared API arenas.

Microsoft is putting Hailstorm and .NET through the standards body known as ECMA. In fact, in the past few years, Microsoft has been more standards-friendly than *any* of its competitors, especially including Sun, which steadfastly refuses to open up Java, despite repeated "carrot and stick" promises to do so.

3. HailStorm is partially designed to place Microsoft between the consumers and the banks and credit card services that authorize payment (and consequently perform a certain level of user authorization as well). The last time that Microsoft tried to do that -- with its Microsoft Money fiasco that tried to do an end run around the banking and credit industries -- the industry as a whole closed ranks and adopted Quicken instead.

Again, not true. Two points: As I said previously, past failure does not indicate future failure; in fact, most Microsoft products take a few revisions to become successful. Secondly, Quicken did not become successful because of some Microsoft mistake. Quicken was always the market leader; Money only exists because of Quicken. This guy needs a history lesson.

4. The highly centrallized nature of the Web-services approach makes HailStorm incredibly susceptible to denial-of-service attacks.

Kindly explain to me why this makes Hailstorm uniquely vulnerable. This is true of all Web properties.

Virtually every major software company today agrees that Web services are the future. It should come as no surprise that the most successful of these companies--Microsoft--would be the furthest along in its goal of delivering on that vision. What's most upsetting about Hailstorm? That they have a concrete plan that they've communicated to users and developers, or that none of their competitors do?

5. Back in the mid-1990s, when Internet hype was first starting to really move into overdrive, an idea that was in vogue for about six months was the Internet Mall, where several businesses would band together to form a virtual shopping portal. They all failed . They failed because there was a confusion between physical and virtual proximity...

Time for another history lesson. They all failed because there weren't enough people on the Web. Maybe this guy never heard of Amazon.com, which is, of course, the realization of the Internet Mall he said never happened.

6. Finally, HailStorm is emblematic of both Microsoft's vision and its myopia.

It sure is. And that "myopia" has made it the most successful software company on earth, with over $30 billion in cash reserves, with $40 billion expected by the end of the year. Sorry, but Microsoft will be successful with Hailstorm, and nothing this clueless author thinks can change that.

You should be ashamed of yourselves for publishing that article, unedited, and full of such obvious factual errors. We're all entitled to opinion, but opinion without basis in fact is useless to any reader.

Paul Thurrott
News Editor
Windows 2000 Magazine

Microsoft apologist, or informed history lesson? Insert your opinion here.