Microsoft Aims to Master Unified Communications with Office Communications
Server 2007
,----[ Quote ]
| “We’re moving along the continuum that started way back when in the CTI
| days,” says Robins. “And now, with the computing horsepower that exists, the
| standardization of IP as the protocol of choice in terms of communications,
| we’ve now got the foundation for this to really propagate everywhere. It’s a
| wonderful thing. The value that Microsoft brings to the table is that they’re
| really the 800-pound gorilla, especially in the PC desktop computing space.
| So Microsoft is in a position to really make this happen in a very big way.
| One day all PBXs will interoperate with the Microsoft communications
| platform, and we’ll see what happens on the mobile side.”
`----
http://sip.tmcnet.com/topics/featured-articles/articles/12582-microsoft-aims-master-unified-communications-with-office-communications.htm
Fearing a Silverlight future, seven states extend antitrust judgment against
Microsoft
,----[ Quote ]
| The states' report seems to imply that Microsoft will try to find a way to
| tie Silverlight to IE in the future, and leverage the 80 percent market share
| of IE on the desktop to try and edge out competitors like Adobe AIR.
`----
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071018-seven-states-move-to-extend-final-judgement-against-microsoft.html
Related:
Could SharePoint Be Microsoft’s New Mode of Lock-In?
,----[ Quote ]
| This could be a tough one for IT leaders. Business users are comfortable with
| Microsoft. They know how to use the Office interface, and apparently like it
| to the point users will create their own mini-BI tools from Excel and opt out
| of the corporate system. But, if Asay’s right, vendor lock-in could cause
| unforeseen problems or major costs down the road.
|
| After reading Asay’s column and the interview with Nicholls, at least you’ll
| know which questions to ask before investing in either SharePoint or an
| alternative solution.
`----
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=198
ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Plotting HTML Hijack
,----[ Quote ]
| An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft
| in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its
| public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing
| Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML's place in the fabric of
| the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon forn
| etwork applications.
`----
http://www.betanews.com/article/ECIS_Accuses_Microsoft_of_Plotting_HTML_Hijack/1169824569
Software rivals say Microsoft's Vista illegal in Europe (at CNNMoney.com)
,----[ Excerpt ]
| Software manufacturers, citing 2004 European Commission finding,
| contend the operating system violates server laws in Europe.
|
| [...]
|
| "Vista is the first step of Microsoft's strategy to extend its market
| dominance to the Internet," the ECIS statement said.
|
| It said Microsoft's XAML markup language was "positioned to replace HTML,"
| the industry standard for publishing documents on the Internet.
|
| Microsoft's own language would be dependent on Windows, and discriminatory
| against rival systems such as Linux, the group says.
|
| They said a so-called "open XML" platform file format, known as OOXML, is
| designed to run seamlessly only on the Microsoft Office platform.
`----
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/26/news/international/bc.vista.microsoft.eu.reut/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
Microsoft: An unfortunate return to its roots?
,----[ Quote ]
| All I wanted was to visit a website and click-through to read customer
| case studies. Perhaps these would automatically load up in Word 2007 if
| I had it (but I don't, because Microsoft will be a bit slow in
| delivering Office for the Mac). And perhaps that would be really
| cool. But today it just feels annoying - like a basic "right" has
| been taken from me so as to extend Microsoft's dominance of the
| desktop to the web.
`----
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/12/microsoft_an_un.html
More obvious misgivings about Microsoft and SOA
,----[ Quote ]
| My take is that inside of Microsoft its aggressor A-types are all about
| dissing SOA and promoting .NET ad nauseam. At the same time the Microserfs
| and developers must understand the inevitability of SOA for at last a portion
| of the most advanced and innovative enterprises’ and service providers’
| architectures.
|
| And so, as the world turns toward SOA, Microsoft will fight quietly inside of
| itself about what it really is as a company — a partner to its customers, or
| a parasite on the hide of productivity.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2538
Microsoft: My way or the highway with SOA?
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft isn’t changing its tune with SOA, the authors say, noting
| that “Microsoft again appears to be crafting its own rules and vision. The
| company has so far declined to participate in certain key emerging industry
| standards relevant to SOA. It has a different perspective on what SOA is and
| a different approach for crystallizing its vision.“
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=931
Microsoft absent from open standards movement around SOA
,----[ Quote ]
| Now, a new series of SOA standards is headed to OASIS, ones that could
| create a whole market segment around SOA common programmatic principles,
| but Microsoft is nowhere in sight. The absence of Microsoft from the
| Service Component Architecture (SCA), and its sibling Service Data
| Objects (SDO), definitions process can mean one thing: Microsoft will
| pursue its proprietary approach of baking pseudo-SOA into its
| operating system stack as long as it can.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2483
Halloween Memo I Confirmed and Microsoft's History on Standards
,----[ Quote ]
| By the way, if you are by any chance trying to figure out Microsoft's policy
| toward standards, particularly in the context of ODF-EOXML, that same
| Microsoft page is revelatory, Microsoft's answer to what the memo meant when
| it said that Microsoft could extend standard protocols so as to deny
| Linux "entry into the market":
|
| Q: The first document talked about extending standard protocols as a way
| to "deny OSS projects entry into the market." What does this mean?
|
| A: To better serve customers, Microsoft needs to innovate above standard
| protocols. By innovating above the base protocol, we are able to deliver
| advanced functionality to users. An example of this is adding
| transactional support for DTC over HTTP. This would be a value-add and
| would in no way break the standard or undermine the concept of standards,
| of which Microsoft is a significant supporter. Yet it would allow us to
| solve a class of problems in value chain integration for our Web-based
| customers that are not solved by any public standard today. Microsoft
| recognizes that customers are not served by implementations that are
| different without adding value; we therefore support standards as the
| foundation on which further innovation can be based.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070127202224445
Microsoft needs REST
,----[ Quote ]
| Yaron Goland defended his Microsoft colleague, Dare Objasanjo, as a poor
| sitting duck. He justifies the decision to scrap APP as tactical and not
| strategic. He states: “We considered this option but the changes needed to
| make APP work for our scenarios were so fundamental that it wasn’t clear if
| the resulting protocol would still be APP… I also have to admit that I was
| deathly afraid of the political implications of Microsoft messing around with
| APP.” According to Goland, “we couldn’t figure out how to use APP without
| putting an unacceptable implementation and performance burden on both our
| customers and ourselves.”
|
| The implications for this APP vs. Web3S debate can potentially be enormous.
| Just as we are on the brink of creating simple architectures that are
| interoperable using simple standards, the industry risks splitting into
| separate, incompatible camps again. It is probably no coincidence that we
| have Microsoft on one side and Google, IBM and Sun on the other. This will be
| a fundamental problem for enterprise customers if Microsoft extends this
| strategy into any REST architectures that it introduces into the enterprise.
| Any enterprise systems that expose their data using APP, which is likely in
| the near future, will be incompatible with any Microsoft system that expose
| their data with Web3S.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Newton/?p=14
|
|
