My timing with this one is perhaps a bit off, given the news, but one of yesterday’s posts from Joe Wilcox reminded me to comment on Scoble’s entry here. What’s more, my colleague’s weighing in on the same theme by propagating the very amusing Redmond Van Winkle meme.
Anyhow, in the Scoble post referred to above, Microsoft’s most famous blogger takes a look at questions around WinFS. Let’s start with the question, asked by Frans Bouma. It’s an intriguing one:
I mean, somewhere on this planet a guy named Hans Reiser wrote with just a couple of people the Reiser4 filesystem, which sports a large amount of complex functionality and is one of the fastest and most secure filesystems known today. (Read more about ReiserFS by clicking here). How could mr. Reiser succeed while Microsoft with all their power failed? (link)
Unsurprisingly, Scoble takes exception to the implicit suggestion that Microsoft is somehow challenged in its development practices, though to his credit he gives it the serious consideration it deserves. Portions of his response are very credible, most notably this tidbit:
Upgrading an installed base is a LOT harder than coming out with new technology that no one has built on top of yet. Think about the engineering problems there. Does Photoshop run on Reiser? Yet it’ll need to run on WinFS cause the market expects that of Windows apps. (link)
True enough, and a solid defense. I’ve taken Scoble to task in the past for the Microsoft tendency to overthink the one-size-fits-all notion, but in this case I think he’s right. That said, Microsoft’s still got a problem on its hands. As Wilcox notes, the defense – while valid – still leaves the door open to question marks:
Yes, Robert’s point is valid, but so is the larger competitive situation Frans alludes to. Microsoft could be displaced, just as IBM was, as non-PC devices start to shape into platforms. (link)
I agree. I don’t know precisely where Wilcox anticipates the threat coming from as he’s a bit coy on the topic, but I know where I think the longer term challenge will come from. And it’s not ReiserFS. It’s instead the folks that don’t have to worry about the installed base Scoble’s talking about – the network application providers. Bosworth said it best here:
Services can typically deploy changes every month or even more rapidly because they only have one single configuration on a set of machines whose OS, storage and networking they totally control and which they manage in their data centers. These days Microsoft gives birth to new products at a pace that makes an elephant seem quick, about every 60 months, that means in the time that a service can make 60 adaptions to its customer’s needs, Microsoft makes one. It used to be that they shipped every 12 months. Then 18. Then 24. And so on. The creep is driven by the ever increasiongly complexity of features, hardware, os variations, and backward compatibility of the API’s so ably designed to lock developers in. They locked the developers in all right. The Microsoft ones. This alone to me has been a compelling argument that when a product can be delivered as a service, it should be. (link)
Are we going to see a future where products intended for massive audiences on heterogeneous platforms become increasingly service-oriented? It seems inevitable given the complexities of delivering software to mixed platform environments. Scoble admits as much here:
We might not be first to market. We might even be last. But we’ll among the first to deliver a technology that hundreds of millions of people are able to use.(link)
Services – particularly as they become richer and more functional – will become a better and better option for application delivery. As Scoble acknowledges with his Photoshop example, how feasible will it continue to be for the WinFSes of the world to support a byzantine labrinyth of legacy applications, antiquated APIs, and incompatible file systems?
Now before anyone gets carried away, I need to insert my standard caveat: I’m not contending this is an either/or proposition – client-side applications will still be a necessity for a whole range of functions – but I do expect the network to gradually consume some traditional client-side tasks. If you added, for example, the ability to do simple group calendaring/scheduling and MX redirects to Gmail, I’d seriously consider it as an alternative to my Exchange/Evolution combination.
Add it all up, and Microsoft’s got some challenges in front of it. Despite that, I think one of Scoble’s right about one thing – anybody counting the folks from Redmond out simply hasn’t followed the company’s history.
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