What Bill Gates didn't say about interoperability
Posted on Feb 14, 2005 at 04:28 PM by John Foley
Interoperability is a subject Microsoft is talking a lot about these days. In a Feb. 3 E-mail to customers, Bill Gates offered a detailed explanation of Microsoft’s approach to software interoperability. And senior VP Eric Rudder talked about it again last week at a conference in San Francisco. Missing, however, is anything specific on what Microsoft will do to improve interoperability between Windows and Linux, an area of obvious need for many customers.
In his “executive briefing” to customers, Gates’ overarching point is that XML and XML-based Web services increasingly are getting baked into Microsoft’s products, and, as that happens, it becomes easier to establish interoperability between Microsoft’s products and those from other vendors. Coinciding with the missive, Microsoft launched a Web page on the subject. Eric Rudder picked up the theme at VS Live (see A Promise Of Interoperability).
It all sounds good, as far as it goes. The subject of Windows-to-Linux interoperability is something InformationWeek has repeatedly asked Microsoft about on behalf of our readers, many of whom use both operating systems. In an October 2003 story titled Staring Down Linux, we reported that 88% of respondents to an InformationWeek Research survey believed Microsoft hadn't done enough to support Windows-Linux interoperability. Those results prompted InformationWeek’s Bob Evans to write an open letter to Microsoft, where he argued that Microsoft’s failure to proactively support Linux would come at the expense of Microsoft’s customers.
A month or so after that, I had an opportunity to ask Gates directly about Windows-Linux interoperability and about Microsoft’s Communications Protocol Program, under which the company offers licenses to its communications protocols. “Name a corporate customer who has some interoperability thing they want from us, because we have interoperability,” Gates responded. “At every level, we're building interoperability.”
A year later, in November 2004, InformationWeek’s Bob Evans took up the issue again, after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent his own E-mail to customers, outlining all the ways Windows is better than Linux, but failing to offer anything new in the way of support for customers who use both platforms. “What a blown opportunity!” Evans wrote, suggesting, rhetorically, that Ballmer create a business unit called Windows/Open Source Integration Services.
So, what did Gates have to say in his Feb. 3 letter to customers about Windows-Linux interoperability? Not much. The word “Linux” appears only once in the message, and his point was that Windows already interoperates with the open-source operating system.
So I decided to ask Kim Saunders, Microsoft’s director of interoperability programs, about Windows-Linux interoperability in particular. “I would not say that we have any specific plans to do more in that particular area,” she said. Microsoft’s approach is to make APIs, software development kits, technical content, and protocols available to others to “enable” Windows-Linux interoperability, she added. Last year, Microsoft began offering its Services for Unix 3.5 software kit free of charge, which helps, and kudos to them for doing so. Yet, Saunders acknowledged that getting different operating systems to work together smoothly still requires some doing. “There’s a lot of effort that goes into making this work in a real customer environment today,” she acknowledged.
Next, I decided to run this issue past a few IT professionals. Robert Dutile, an executive VP of IT with Key Bank, said he doesn’t need Microsoft to do much more than it’s already doing, largely because his approach is to “loosely couple” heterogeneous systems where necessary and use a services-oriented architecture to allow for software handshakes. If Dutile had one request it would be to be able to monitor both Windows and Linux systems without having to get extra adapters to do it.
Rich Powers, director of advanced technology with FMC, had more a specific request. “The one area where we would like to see better integration would be in the area of security. We've made considerable investment in Active Directory and it would be very useful if we could incorporate Linux servers under the common identity and authorization framework used by windows. I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, but that would be one item that would be very useful in terms of Windows-Linux interoperability.”
In the February issue of Optimize magazine, two other experts take opposites sides in the Microsoft interoperability debate. Jeff Gould, CEO of Peerstone Research, says don’t look for Microsoft’s SQL Server database to run on Linux anytime soon. “For reasons related to its business strategy, not technical necessity, Microsoft doesn't want this,” Gould writes.
So Bill Gates is right when he says Microsoft has already delivered technology that let Windows and Linux work together in some ways. And he’s right again when he says Web services will improve interoperability across all types of software. But that’s not the whole story. And it’s what Bill Gates didn’t say that may mean continued self-reliance for many of his customers.
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