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Microsoft: a way to mainstream OLE - Blackbird application development software - includes related article on application development software - Product Information

Microsoft's vision of online authoring, as manifest through its development system code-named Blackbird, is the most ambitious of the vendors covered in this issue (Netscape is the runner-up). This is not because Blackbird is a more grandiose or encompassing application suite, but rather because Microsoft's approach is more integrative. Although the vision is based on much technology that is proprietary to Microsoft, it fits well with where we believe the electronic infrastructure is headed (see Choose Your Topology in Release 1.0, 6-95).

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Blackbird is Microsoft's attempt to create a system that works well with the public Web, yet also offers proprietary advantages and even private labeling for companies that want to create their own complete service offerings. Beyond that, Microsoft sees Blackbird as an opportunity to merge many disparate development systems, from voice processing to client/server application development, all around OLE. OLE deconstructs applications into custom controls and other software objects; Blackbird helps deploy those applets across the Microsoft Network (MSN), and soon the Internet.

In fact, Blackbird is a way to mainstream OLE and potentially get the rest of the (non-microsoft) world using it. This will take considerable time, if it happens at all. Whether Microsoft's tools and design concepts are up to the challenge is an open question, and this strategy puts Microsoft's developers in a situation that has all the complexity of its own systems as well as the global Internet.

Bill be nimble, Bill be quick...

Microsoft's challenge is to make MSN flourish soon, so that it won't be eclipsed by more open systems, making Blackbird irrelevant, or at least obsolescent. The situation is similar to AT&T's with Interchange, which is also a proprietary network with more layout flexibility than the Web offers today. AT&T and Microsoft must deliver great development tools in order to maintain their advantage.

In fact, because it owns the operating system that Blackbird is optimized for, Microsoft alone must continue to improve the underlying architectures and protocols, many of which date back to the earliest versions of DOS. The Web is rapidly getting more interesting and powerful, in large part because thousands of companies and individuals are collectively improving it, a process which has its own drawbacks.

Because of the market-access advantages that almost brought about a Department of Justice intervention, MSN is likely to do well anyway as a private service. The question at hand is whether Microsoft's networked-application architecture makes it beyond MSN's walls and becomes more commonly used. The innovations Netscape is introducing, described above, make this a difficult task. This is where the battle between proprietary operating systems and the Internet is being fought.

What it offers

Blackbird isn't a monolithic content-creation environment. Instead, it is a platform within which other Ole-compliant Windows applications can become content-creation tools and even distributed applications. Microsoft wants Blackbird to be an inviting environment for third-party tools. The pace of technological change will help. Connectivity will change all standalone applications, making many obsolete. With Blackbird, Microsoft is attempting to offer traditional Windows applications a viable path to re-create and re-validate themselves in the networked world. It so happens that this path tends to make the applications dissolve into the Win95/Office framework.

According to Rich Barth, the group product manager of MSN tools, today developers have to write to the limitations of Web browsers. In Blackbird, developers don't see a browser, they see an empty window in a Win95 environment and have control over everything that happens within it, including the menu bar. In that sense, Blackbird offers more design freedom than Netscape's innovations, the way Hypercard was more flexible than the inviolable Macintosh interface.

What it is

Blackbird is designed as a full-life-cycle interactive application development system. It has three components: an authoring system called the Blackbird Designer; the Blackbird Server, which runs on Windows NT; and the Blackbird Client, a runtime module that lets users access and run Blackbird applications. Designers create "titles" that contain "articles."

Blackbird titles have three components: form layouts and other design elements, OLE custom controls to render data and the data itself. Articles can be dynamic, defined at runtime (see "Blackbird and Visual Basic"). The whole system is extensible in much the way that developers today write applications for the

Windows platform. Think of it as a way to turn an online environment into a platform similar to Windows -- no surprise there. (As is true for MSN, Blackbird does not support Windows 3.1.)

Without OLE, integration requires joint coding with each candidate application, as Macromedia is doing to make Director a part of Netscape. In the Blackbird vision, any application that is a good OLE citizen is a candidate for integration online. Macromedia is working with MSN to make this happen, though it could do so without Microsoft's cooperation.

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Microsoft: a way to mainstream OLE - Blackbird application development software - includes related article on application development software - Product Information

RELease 1.0, Sept 18, 1995

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