Microsoft Banks on XML as the .NET Glue

Software Magazine, August, 2001 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Microsoft is pushing eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the industry standard for integrating applications, services, and collaborative devices.

At the recent Microsoft Fusion 2001 Partner Conference held in Anaheim, Calif., Charles Stevens, vice president of Microsoft's Enterprise & Partner Group, called XML an important revolution that is the glue that will link all together.

"We're pushing this new approach where XML is the key standard," says Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect. "It's all about the ease of development. Our customers understand that just having Web pages isn't going to get them where they want to be in e-commerce."

XML is not new. People started experimenting with this standard back in 1996. The "new approach" Gates refers to is the Microsoft.NET platform, which is supposed to open the door to a multitude of integrated technologies anytime, anywhere, and on any device for millions of people.

According to Gates, Microsoft utilized XML in earlier releases of Windows, VisualStudio, Office, and SQL Server by putting it on top of those products. "The new generation is more profound," says Gates. "It's getting XML into the very core of the products. It takes the direction we have already set with XML to a new level."

High Point in Cycle

After last year's low having to deal with the antitrust lawsuit, Microsoft is at a high point of its product cycle this year. "We've never had a year with that many new product releases, and all of them within the strategy called .NET," says Gates. "BizTalk came out earlier in the year; Office XP came out a couple of months ago; and Windows XP and VisualStudio.NET are coming out later on this year."

When Microsoft recently rewrote its Web sites into the VisualStudio.NET tool, Gates says the company used less than a quarter of the code and got better performance. "This is the first built-from-scratch tool for the Internet era [that accommodates] both HTML and XML," says Gates. "We're just at the beginning of this digital era. I can't say that all the challenges of XML Web Services are understood, but I can say that the key standards are now in place."

XML Web Services, code-named "HailStorm," is part of Microsoft's .NET initiative that uses an application service provider (ASP) model to distribute services.

.NET is a computing model where data will be available easily, turning the Internet into a distributed platform. Conceding that this path is very ambitious, Gates says: "Only a company with a very large R&D budget can focus on this path. Microsoft is on the march, driving the industry forward into new scenarios based on XML."

Whither Java?

A partner asked whether Java was a challenge and how Microsoft was going to competitively meet the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) camp. "It's not the language we should be looking at," says Gates. "It's the XML initiative. J2EE is a very amorphous thing. The level of commonality is too shallow for it to be a platform. We're much more competing with individual products such as [IBM] WebSphere and [BEA] WebLogic."

Microsoft recently announced its decision not to bundle the Java virtual machine (NM) in the forthcoming Windows XP operating system.