By Stuart J.
Johnston
To put this latest round of antitrust maneuverings in context, consider this: The government's
consent decree with Microsoft specifically excludes Windows NT. NT Workstation sales are
steadily ramping up, with Microsoft selling 3.5 million units in the past six months alone.
Even though this number accounts for only 5% to 10% of all desktop shipments, the trend is
clear, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was exceptionally clear at last week's launch of Windows 98:
The successor to Windows 95 is for consumers, not for business.
The SPA is obviously concerned that so far the Justice Department has chosen to look just at
Internet Explorer and Windows 98. Justice is also rumored to be examining Microsoft's behavior
vis-a-vis Java, but everyone knows that Microsoft's ultimate goal is NT everywhere. It's not
unreasonable for the SPA to think that the Justice Department is being altogether too
short-sighted about this.
What the SPA is concerned about is something that InformationWeek discussed in some detail
the week the second lawsuit was filed ("Value Proposition,"
Information Week, May 25). In our cover story, we state a major part of the issue: "While
the government acts on Windows 98, Microsoft gets even more aggressive with enterprise
bundles."
Whether that behavior is something that the courts ultimately find actionable is another
question altogether. However, the drafters of the SPA's white paper believe it is a very real
anticompetitive threat to its other members.
In addition to objecting to Microsoft's simply including more and more free software in the
operating system, however, the SPA is specifically concerned about COM integration. The
problem in talking about COM is that it's not really one technology and it's not really a product.
In telecommunications parlance, COM is the intelligence hidden inside Microsoft's
communications "cloud."
Users, and computer systems staffers, aren't supposed to have to worry about what goes on
inside the cloud. It could be magic for all they care.
Well, COM is the magic inside Microsoft's cloud. It aims to provide all kinds of services to
distributed enterprise applications, both now and in the future as it gains more capabilities.
That's what worries SPA members like IBM and Sun Microsystems. They have their own magic
inside their own clouds, and their claim is that their clouds are "open" and that Microsoft's has a
lock-in feature.
That is, once a third-party application developer writes his code to work with Microsoft's cloud,
that application will be stuck on COM and there won't be much incentive to support all those
other "open" clouds that are out there or are likely to be developed. NT's big pitch, after all, is
based on the premise that it provides a huge price/performance advantage over all of those
other, more expensive options. It is an effective value proposition for many types of computing
tasks, and as NT becomes more capable with the arrival of NT 5.0 next year and a 64-bit version
a year or so after that, the competitors are worried about more and more of the Microsoft camel
nosing its way into their tent ... er, market.
Coming soon, in fact, Microsoft plans to directly integrate its Microsoft Transaction Server,
including store-and-forward message queuing, into the next iteration of COM. So, in the future,
when an application needs to invoke a transaction or multiple transactions across the network,
there will be only a simple system call to make, and NT will do the rest. At least that's
Microsoft's painting of the picture -- and what's more, Transaction Server won't cost the big
bucks that customers now have to shell out for BEA Systems' Tuxedo or IBM's TXSeries
transaction processing monitors.
You see this coming in the language that Microsoft executive VP Steve Ballmer used in his
keynote at the company's TechEd developers conference in New Orleans in late May. Instead of
Transaction Server, he referred to Transactional Services. That is, instead of referring to it as
a product, he referred to it as a technology. Translated: "Here's something else we're going to
include as a basic feature of the operating system."
What's wrong with that? Tuxedo costs nearly $2,000 for each client machine compared to free,
bundled-with-the-server operating system (of course, it isn't really free since Microsoft
Transaction Server currently comes with NT Server Enterprise Edition, which costs extra). But
if you look at any of the really fast NT benchmarks for transaction processing posted on the
Transaction Processing Performance Council's Web site
(http://www.tpc.org/execsum_TPCC.html), you'll note that they are virtually all using Tuxedo.
In fact, I've heard rumblings that IT staffs are loath to use Transaction Server because it is not
as mature as the third-party offerings. But if it is a standard feature of the operating system,
and it is used by third-party developers, there is little reason to buy the third-party transaction
processors. Also, don't forget that in order to obtain the coveted "Designed for Microsoft
BackOffice" logo, applications developers have to take advantage of all the features offered by
BackOffice and Windows NT.
From the SPA's perspective, that all seems pretty insidious and smacks of anticompetitive
practices. And they want the Justice Department to do something about it before members'
markets are completely eroded.
Sorting out a discussion like this in court is going to be next to impossible. If a judge has to
appoint a special investigator to try to figure out what is integrated into Windows 95, how is he
or she going to sort out what happens inside the cloud and whether or not that is illegal?
Even if a lower court judge thought he or she had sorted through all of those issues, what sort of
ruling will come from an appeals court that is pretty obviously of a mind that the law should
keep its hands off of system software?
My bet is that this is one of those areas where they'll never be able to find a jury of Bill Gates'
peers.
ate last month, the Software Publishers Association came out with its 40-page white paper
entreating the U.S. Department of Justice to take on Microsoft over Windows NT and its
Component Object Model. The SPA is obviously intent on making a bigger point here, and its
concerns deserve a look.
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