InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

March 26, 2001

Printer-friendly

Promises, Promises

Will HailStorm's promise live up to your notebook's?

etter watch out. A hailstorm is coming. We're about to become participants in Bill Gates' next big five-year plan. (Or if you've been around long enough to remember that it took Microsoft seven years to take Windows from absolute vaporware to a breakout product, perhaps it's Chairman Bill's next seven-year plan.)

HailStorm, as you probably already know, is the code name for the first major set of building-block services that Microsoft aims to debut in the next year as part of its .Net master plan. It's really serious this time. No, I really mean it.

Before you pass out from hyperventilating while laughing yourself off your office chair, I think you really should take a minute to think about this seriously. Certainly, Microsoft and Chairman Bill have in the past had grand plans that didn't live up to the hype or took forever to accomplish--or simply vanished in a whimper of indifference from users, later to be denied altogether.

Don't get me started. I just passed my 13th anniversary in this asylum--um, I mean--my office, where I've cheerfully (place smiley-face icon here) covered Microsoft as my raison d'etre.

We're a couple of years past the time when Microsoft promised it would scale its software and reliability to the point that it would finally rate inclusion in big data centers. Somehow, though, we got here and still I can't work on multiple complex projects, in which I have lots of E-mail messages and browser windows open at once, without running out of Windows "resources," whatever those are.

When my browser quits displaying the front and back buttons (not just graying them out--they vanish completely or the back button quits working altogether), when Outlook 2000 quits singing "you who" every time I get a new E-mail, when I'm told that "text formatting command is unavailable" as I try to read my latest E-mail, when other programs warn me to "quit one or more applications" because I'm dangerously short of memory even though I know for a fact that I have a hundred megabytes to spare, when I resignedly acknowledge to a colleague on the phone that I couldn't respond to his instant message a minute ago because My Computer won't display anything except the borders of the AOL Instant Messenger window, when all I can do is try to save as many of my files as possible before rebooting, though usually it requires a hard reset (I'm getting really good at poking a ballpoint pen into that little hole at the side of my notebook)--when all that happens daily, I have to admit that I do get a mite short-tempered about Chairman Bill's history of the future as we'd like to see it.

Sorry for the rant, but that same scenario happened to me again just now, after just having to go through the whole charade more than once a day for a week. I mean, how can you play back all those cool multimedia viles--I mean, files--from the Internet news sites when your notebook PC will no longer play audio because you've opened or closed too many messages or browser windows? I feel like I'm back in my mom's day before they invented "talkies." The pictures move but there's no sound.

With digital subscriber line, I've got bandwidth to spare for streaming video clips. But what good is that when you can't hear what's being said? I don't mean "all singing, all dancing," but when some analyst is trying to tell me what the latest tech development means, I'd like to do more than try to read his lips. Perhaps, with the fact that Microsoft's new advanced user interface group has one of the very best groups of speech-recognition researchers on the planet, it could automatically insert subtitles into those streaming videos, since the company's product developers can't seem to keep my audio working reliably.

But seriously, folks. I did not come to praise Caesar but to bury him--ooops, I mean--to talk about HailStorm. Actually, however, I'm sure you'll have your eyeballs rattled in coming months with more news and information about Microsoft's Web services initiatives than you'll ever want to know. And I don't want to spoil that for you. But I did want to leave you with one really important point: They're really serious this time. (I mean, you really are, aren't you guys?)

Stuart J. Johnston has covered Microsoft for more than 13 years. He can be reached at stuartj@halcyon.com.

AuthorITies Archive
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page


Lou Bertin: The Observer Lou offers a view of the good, the bad, and the bizarre developments in the technology business	Jason Levitt: Internet Zone Jason focuses on the strange, egregious, and the standard technologies of the intranet/Internet.	Rusty Weston: Matter Of Fact Rusty explores the facts and figures behind business technology.