Rohit
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[Brad] Chase points out that Microsoft is "very involved" with many
standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the IETF.
"We have over 100 people working full-time on standardization and product
development in these areas, and we have three full-time people just doing
coordination of all of the standards work going on around the company."
The company's investment in standards is thus comparable to its investment
in public relations, which is formidable by anyone's standards. Mich
Mathews, the head of Microsoft's public relations department, says the
company has 150 full-time public relations professionals working for it.
Kevin Kean, group product manager for the NT Group's Communi-cations
Products at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus, says the company's technical
community is extremely active in the standards process. "Our development and
program managers participate in any number of standards bodies, from
low-level network stuff to high-level APIs," he says. "Our activities range
from simple participation to actively influencing the development of new
standards."
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They have a passworded site (free). http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1005ms.html
It's worth visiting for the charts and a certain picture.
Read below for extensive and vehement rebuttal from a certain ex-W3C
staffer...
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Microsoft and standards: The rules have changed
The software giant still has standards clout, but in a world gone
Internet-mad it can no longer dictate the agenda.
By Geoffrey James
Network World, 10/05/98
Four years ago, Network World published a series of three articles
suggesting Microsoft was gaining control of the network through its ability
to set de facto standards. The series made the case that Microsoft had
"sprinted ahead of plodding standards groups" and "used its market share to
push its specifications so far into the market that even its biggest rivals
have to play along."
We asked a group of Network World readers their thoughts on Microsoft. The
following pie charts show their opinions.
Since then, Microsoft has been forced to fight a horde of legal actions
intended to prevent it from leveraging what some see as a monopoly on the
desktop. At the same time, the explosive growth of the Internet has utterly
transformed the network landscape - a development few foresaw in 1994.
Amidst the swirl of legal wrangling and rapid market transition, Network
World set out to discover just how much power Microsoft wields in the
standards-setting process. We surveyed 200 readers for their opinions on the
matter and interviewed dozens of interested parties, including users,
officials with standards bodies and interest groups, competitors and
consultants.
The rules have changed
The software giant still has standards clout, but in a world gone
Internet-mad, it can no longer dictate the agenda.
While it's clear Microsoft is intimately involved in the standards process,
there is no conclusive evidence that the company has successfully
manipulated the process to give itself a competitive advantage. Rather, the
evidence shows that the onset of Internet technologies has put a premium on
standards and interoperability, leaving Microsoft with far less ability to
influence network standards than its detractors claim.
The case against Microsoft
One of the harshest critics of Microsoft's behavior in the network arena is
the Software Publisher's Association (SPA), the principal trade association
of the software industry, representing 1,200 member companies accounting for
85% of U.S. revenue for packaged and online software. Despite the fact that
Microsoft is a member, the SPA recently published a scathing report,
"Competition in the Network Market: The Microsoft Challenge," that accuses
Microsoft of setting de facto standards that favor the company's products.
According to Lauren Hall, the SPA's chief technologist and author of the
report, "Microsoft has an incredible potential for locking the network
market up because if you control the protocols that the desktop can
understand, you can control the protocols that are supported on the
network."
The SPA is especially concerned that Windows NT will dominate the market,
giving Microsoft too much leverage with respect to standards and other
issues. The group has even asked the Department of Justice to look into
Microsoft's behavior in the network market. The government appears to be
listening because the Justice Department is indeed investigating the role
and status of Windows NT, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Gina
Talamona. While Talamona would not reveal the status of those
investigations, she says they are continuing.
The SPA report echoes the concerns voiced in the original Network World
articles, which described the potential industry impact of Microsoft
standards such as the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) protocol for
heterogeneous database access, the Messaging API (MAPI) and Object Linking
and Embedding (OLE), a mechanism for linking applications.
Since the publication of those articles, ODBC has had a "huge impact,"
according to Todd Chipman, a senior analyst at the Giga Information Group in
Santa Clara, Calif. "It allows Microsoft to set database standards, thereby
making it easier to displace Oracle with Microsoft's Access database
product."
MAPI's impact has been more muted because of the advent of the Internet. "A
lot of vendors are just using the Internet standard SMTP as opposed to
MAPI," explains Tom Austin, vice president and research fellow at Gartner
Group. MAPI remains a proprietary Microsoft specification, used in products
such as Outlook.
As for OLE, it has been subsumed into Microsoft's Component Object Model
(COM) standard, which functions as a common language that enables various
software elements to communicate with one another. It's the COM standard
with which the SPA has a particular beef. Microsoft developed COM in
competition with the evolving industry standard Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA), which was promoted by the Object Management Group.
According to the SPA, the CORBA standard would have had "widespread benefit
for interoperability between vendors across the computer industry."
Microsoft's adherence to COM, on the other hand, "allows Microsoft to
maintain a proprietary advantage."
At first glance, this argument seems shaky because CORBA has been widely
accepted. "CORBA has been successful," Hall admits. "But the thing that
concerns us is that the increasing installed base of NT licenses gives
Microsoft a dominant market position."
Corporate IT managers might balk at buying products that are tightly
integrated with standards that Microsoft might not support in the future,
she says. In other words, even when Microsoft supports standards other than
its own, the company has the power to selectively withdraw that support or
at least threaten to - actions that could fatally cripple a competitor.
It's not just the SPA that's worried about Microsoft's influence. Network
World subscribers agreed by a more than 2-to-1 margin - 55% to 25% - that
Microsoft uses its power to establish standards to gain an unfair advantage
over the competition.
Playing along
Microsoft denies it has any intention to use network standards in that
fashion and questions whether it's even appropriate for a trade association
to get involved in matters of litigation between its members and the
government. "It's unfortunate that a small handful of competitors are using
the SPA to wage an anti-Microsoft campaign rather than work on common
industry challenges," says Brad Chase, Microsoft's vice president of Windows
marketing and developer relations.
"The key standards such as HTML have been developed by the industry working
together," Chase says. "We support industry standards wherever possible."
Chase points out that Microsoft has adopted TCP/IP, HTTP, base HTML, Secure
Sockets Layer, Kerberos and many other standards in the Internet and network
area. And even in cases where Microsoft advocates technology outside of the
formal standards process, the company tries to develop them in "an open and
collaborative fashion with our partners," according to Chase.
A case in point is the Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP). Microsoft worked
with Tandem to define a protocol that would ensure multivendor transaction
monitors would work with one another to complete transactions over the
Internet. They submitted their idea to the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), and the result is RFC 2371, issued in July. James Utzschneider,
director of the line of business evangelism at Microsoft, says TIP now has
widespread vendor backing. "It will become a standard," he says.
Utzschneider bridles at the suggestion that Microsoft is less than
cooperative with standards bodies. "We're doing all we can," he says.
Chase points out that Microsoft is "very involved" with many standards
bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the IETF. "We have
over 100 people working full-time on standardization and product development
in these areas, and we have three full-time people just doing coordination
of all of the standards work going on around the company."
The company's investment in standards is thus comparable to its investment
in public relations, which is formidable by anyone's standards. Mich
Mathews, the head of Microsoft's public relations department, says the
company has 150 full-time public relations professionals working for it.
Kevin Kean, group product manager for the NT Group's Communi-cations
Products at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus, says the company's technical
community is extremely active in the standards process. "Our development and
program managers participate in any number of standards bodies, from
low-level network stuff to high-level APIs," he says. "Our activities range
from simple participation to actively influencing the development of new
standards."
The motive question
Giga Information Group's Chipman, however, is cynical about Microsoft's
standards activity. He says Microsoft is "trying to propagate its own
proprietary technology and achieve a dominance by locking customers into a
Microsoft-centric solution." He believes Microsoft participates in standards
processes mostly for show. "Participation makes Microsoft look like they're
trying to work with the rest of the industry rather than just trying to
dominate it," he says. "Perception is everything in this business."
Keith Brannon, chief technical programming officer at the International
Standards Organization (ISO), seems to share some of Chipman's suspicions
regarding Microsoft's motives. "To my knowledge, Microsoft has never
submitted a standard to ISO," he says. "There have been efforts made to
involve Microsoft in the process with various specifications, but Microsoft
has been reluctant to play along."
Microsoft denies it's ignoring the ISO. Chase says the company is
increasingly active in the Joint Technical Committee 1, which coordinates
activities between the ISO and the International Electrotechnical
Commission. Microsoft is also "very active" in several ISO subcommittees,
Chase says, such as SC 29, which is working on MPEG specifications for
digital audio/video encoding.
Nonetheless, the perception lingers that when Microsoft participates in the
standards process, it is to steer the outcome to meet its own ends, even at
the expense of the greater good.
A full 40% of respondents to the Network World survey expressed concern over
the level of control Microsoft has in the standards process. The concern was
even greater - at 47% - among respondents from large organizations.
Perhaps that perception stems from standards battles of the past, such as
that over the Desktop Management Interface (DMI), a specification drawn up
by the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF). The DMTF was founded in 1992 by
a group of leading vendors, including Microsoft, to define a bidirectional
path that would enable a central management station to interrogate all the
hardware and software components within a PC.
The resulting DMI, released in 1994, consists of four parts, only two of
which Microsoft decided to support. The company said its Plug and Play
technology addressed the other two components, which collect and store
device information. Microsoft argued it could use Plug and Play, which was
already in Windows 95 and was adopted by third parties, to collect
management data. The company did pledge to use the remaining DMI components
to ship management data to a central console.
The decision didn't sit well with many other vendors, which perceived
Microsoft was twisting the standard to give itself a proprietary advantage.
Ultimately, most vendors implemented the DMI to some extent, but the
standard fell far short of providing its intended benefit.
Fast forward to this year and contrast DMI with the Common Information Model
(CIM), another DMTF standard that grew, in part, out of the Web-based
Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative spearheaded by Microsoft and Cisco.
Microsoft's strong backing of CIM has a bevy of vendors eager to support the
specification, which enables management programs to exchange information.
Ajay Singh, president and CEO of Proactive Networks, a Santa Clara, Calif.
start-up, says Microsoft's backing of CIM is "absolutely" a big plus for his
company. Proactive Networks focuses on analyzing data culled from various
network components to identify key trends. SNMP makes it relatively easy to
get all the network data required, but extracting performance data from
servers and applications is a tougher nut to crack. "If Microsoft says CIM
is the way to go as a standard way to get information on servers, that makes
it suddenly easier to get that information," Singh says.
Sally Khudari, who until last month was head of communications at the W3C,
is generally supportive of Microsoft's standards efforts, but she
acknowledges Microsoft can threaten a standard by refusing to cooperate.
"That causes confusion and may or may not cause the adoption of the
standards to be completely shaken."
For example, the W3C invited Microsoft to participate in development of the
Synchronized Multimedia Integrated Language (SMIL) standard, but the company
elected not to participate. Ian Jacobs, a technical editor in the W3C's
communications group, says the decision "shook the working group, but enough
people think it's a valid specification so that the consortium continues to
support it, even without Microsoft's blessing."
Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn says there's a good reason behind the
company's SMIL 1.0 decision. "We simply thought that the technology was not
ready and was in need of additional work toward better and more complete
integration with the document object model and with HTML," Sohn says. It was
a customer satisfaction issue, he says, not some nefarious attempt to
scuttle a competing standard. Microsoft is working with the W3C on future
versions of SMIL, Sohn notes.
Praise from standards-setters
There's little question that a yea or nay from Microsoft can seal the fate
of certain standards. But the notion that Microsoft bullies network
standards organizations is much harder to prove and certainly is not shared
inside most standards bodies.
Khudari praises Microsoft for its involvement and contributions to the W3C.
She also vehemently denies that Microsoft has had an undue influence on the
development of the organization's standards, which includes Extensible
Markup Language (XML) - a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup
Language, a document language designed for use on the Web and sanctioned by
the W3C.
While Khudari concedes Microsoft was on the XML working group before its
major competitors, she "challenges anyone to tell us that we veer toward any
individual vendor. We're vendor-neutral, and we mean it." The group is also
open to all types of organizations, including commercial, educational and
governmental entities, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. It now has over
250 industrial members, and therefore, is a large enough group that no one
organization can dominate.
Jim Carlo, chairman of the umbrella subcommittee for LAN standards at the
IEEE, likewise questions whether any company - Microsoft included - can
manipulate the standards process to its own advantage. "It's not a question
of my company's position is such and so.' Standards are set by individuals,
not the companies that sponsor them," Carlo says.
Steve Coya, executive director of the IETF - a mostly volunteer organization
of working groups dedicated to identifying problems and proposing technical
solutions for the Internet - similarly doubts whether any vendor, even
Microsoft, has the power to dictate network standards. "There are times that
Microsoft attempts to set their own proprietary standards, and there are
times that they participate with the IETF on international standards," he
says. Most of Microsoft's proprietary standards tend to be built only into
Microsoft products and thus have a limited impact on the industry as a
whole, he notes.
Competitors' views
While standards organizations, with the possible exception of the ISO, do
not see Microsoft as a threat, there's little question that some of
Microsoft's competitors are worried about the company's role in the
marketplace. One indication of this, according to the SPA's Hall, has been
"a good deal of support from the industry" for the SPA's report on
Microsoft. Hall notes, however, that few vendors are willing to speak out
openly against Microsoft for fear of damaging their relationship with the
software giant. "We have quiet support, but companies want their
confidentiality protected," she explains.
Two of Microsoft's biggest competitors - Novell and Sun - are not afraid to
comment on Microsoft's role, but neither company appears to buy the notion
that Microsoft has undue control over network standards.
Michael MacKay, vice president of corporate architecture at Novell, points
out that even proposals that originated at Microsoft are moving into an open
industry arena in which Novell and close to 50 other companies are
participating. "While the impetus may come originally from work that
Microsoft started, in effect a much larger group of people and companies
must participate before it can become a standard," he explains.
MacKay cites the WBEM initiative as one such proposal and the Directory
Enabled Network (DEN) standard as another in which Novell and others are
actively participating with Microsoft to define an industry standard. Even
though DEN was originally proposed by Microsoft and Cisco, it concerns a
technology area in which Novell, due to its extensive experience with
directory services, has been able to take a leadership role. "We submitted
and are continuing to move other schema design work for the management of
Internet protocols into the DEN standard and are working very actively with
the DEN group," MacKay says.
Like Novell, Sun doesn't see Microsoft as being in a position to dictate
network standards. Rob Gingell, vice president and Sun Fellow, points out
that the Internet evolved out of technology over which Microsoft had little
or no control or input. As a result, it's hard for Microsoft to change the
technical direction that the Internet and networks in general are taking, he
says.
Gingell furthermore believes Microsoft lacks the power to unilaterally set
de facto standards on the network. He says there is an advantage to creating
technologies that do get adopted as standards, but that it is now impossible
for any company - including Microsoft - to set up exclusive control of a key
standard. "You have to get other people to code to it, something that isn't
likely if the standard is seen as overly proprietary," he explains.
In addition, there are layers of network standards and protocols in which
Microsoft has little or no influence. One example is digital subscriber line
(DSL), the modem technology that increases the digital speed of ordinary
telephone lines by a substantial factor over common V.34 (33.6K bit/sec)
modems. "DSL is a physically layered mechanism, and Microsoft doesn't play
at that level," says Kiran Narsu, director of remote communications services
for Giga Information Group.
Times have changed
Even in those instances when Microsoft did try to promote its own technology
as a standard, the company wasn't always successful. A relevant example is
NetBIOS Extended User Interface, (NetBEUI), an enhanced version of the
NetBIOS protocol Microsoft tried to promote as a de facto LAN transport
standard. The company also supported TCP/IP but not in a robust fashion,
making it difficult for Windows developers to code to TCP/IP. Microsoft lost
that battle as the Internet swamped the network world. Today, Microsoft has
retreated so thoroughly from its NetBEUI bias that the company's own
internal network is now "100% IP," according to Sohn.
Jim Garden, director of Microsoft studies at Hampton, N.H.-based Technology
Business Research, summarizes: "The view that Microsoft can control
networking protocols simply doesn't hold water."
In other words, the landscape has changed since Network World published its
series of articles on Microsoft's impact on network standards. Four years
ago, Microsoft's domination of network standards seemed like an inexorable
juggernaut. Today the company still wields power, but the rise of the
Internet has reduced Microsoft's clout in the network standards arena.
The original client/server model assumed a high level of intimacy between
the client and server portions of an application. Microsoft's presence in
desktop operating systems carried enormous leverage under this tightly
coupled paradigm because each client application had to be rewritten for
each desktop platform. This made it much more economical to write to
Microsoft's desktop APIs and standards than to alternative APIs and
standards, simply because there were so many Microsoft desktops in the
world.
Web-based computing, however, is changing the client/server paradigm.
Applications written for the Internet, intranet or extranet no longer have
to be as intimate with the client operating environment because the browsers
- which are cross-platform - execute the client application. In addition,
Web computing has encouraged many companies to implement client/server in a
three-tiered architecture, with heterogeneous desktops on the bottom tier,
Web servers in the middle and a legacy or database system running in the
background as a top tier. While many client/server applications are still
being written for Windows, there's enormous interest among customers in
technologies, such as Sun's Java, which are not only platform independent,
but also allow the client application to be supported centrally.
The Web has thus made network standards more important, while weakening the
influence any individual vendor can wield on those standards. "There is a
new paradigm today - the Web," says Dick Bradner, vice president of
computing and communications at Cleveland-based National City Corp. "And
network standards are the fundamental building blocks."
Web computing has made it difficult, if not impossible, for Microsoft to
foist proprietary network software onto its customers.
"In the absence of the Internet, Microsoft had a major role in setting
network standards," says Craig Metzler, senior vice president and regional
director at Highway One, an advertising agency in San Francisco. "But
Microsoft came to the market a little late, and now I don't think it has an
omnipresent power."
In short, the Internet has changed the rules by putting a premium on truly
open standards. And such standards are something that no company - not even
Microsoft - will ever be able to provide without the cooperation of the rest
of the industry.
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