InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
June 8, 1998
TechView:
Microsoft's COM-unist Manifesto
By Sean Gallagher
f there was ever a perfect spokesperson for Microsoft, it was probably Nikita Khrushchev. At least "We will bury you" has more of a ring of truth to it than "Where do you want to go today?"
That became even more clear to me last week at Microsoft's TechEd conference for developers and users in New Orleans. Steve Ballmer demonstrat ed several new Microsoft products that will, to put it gently, make life more difficult for other software companies. I call the collection of strategies that make up Microsoft's Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA) worldview the COM-unist Manifesto.
Microsoft's DNA framework is an attempt to make the Windows platforms good interoperable enterprise citizens--mostly because its customers have told them it has to. Ballmer's keynote at TechEd was full of enterprise détente announcements--like an agreement with Iona to make Microsoft Transaction Server and Iona's Object Transaction Monitor talk to each other directly. There was a similar announcement regarding Digital's ACMS, and another concerning Visual Edge Software porting the COM object model to Unix.
What these add up to isn't exactly glasnost for Microsoft--it's more like COM-unist expansionism. By connecting to the high end of the enterprise on its own terms--through the COM model--Microsoft is attempting to overcome the scalab ility problems of Windows NT by turning enterprise systems into mere extensions of the NT application environment. What Microsoft embraces, it eventually absorbs.
Just ask the folks in the online analytical processing business. For several years, Microsoft has been content to be the horse that OLAP rode in on, with many vendors leveraging Excel on the desktop and SQL Server as a "data mart." But now, leveraging its dominance in desktop suites and its growing share of the database server market, Microsoft is moving in on the OLAP market with the same strategy that it has used in almost every other area of the software industry--bundling of the features of the leading products in the category into existing, dominant Microsoft product lines.
Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 and the next version of Excel will extend the low-end OLAP capabilities already present in the two products with the addition on the server side of the "Plato" OLAP engine and a tie to it from Excel's "Pivot Table" feature. The re sult is a data analysis tool that rivals both server-side and client-side OLAP products. And these pieces of functionality will be, essentially, free. Microsoft's moves will drive down the cost of doing OLAP (and other enterprise applications), at least for the short term.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless you're Arbor, Brio, or another OLAP tool vendor. Then it looks like an iron curtain descending across your market share.
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