The Good, The Bad, The Microsoft

It has been another Microsoft week in desktop computing news -- and The World's Largest Software Company and Legend In It's Own Mind didn't even hold one of those week-long infomercials it's thrown so many of this spring. (We've had the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, the CEO Summit, the Management Summit, and most recently TechEd, to name just those I can remember at the moment.)I have occasionally been rather critical of Microsoft in these columns, and will be so again in the future (probably the very near future, like within the next two paragraphs), but now I want to say something nice: Microsoft's announcement last Friday that it will add code to Longhorn to standardize RSS feeds for use by machine-to-machine, application-to-application data transfers is one of the most interesting ideas I've heard since Christmas. There are some blanks to be filled in, of course, but it opens up possibilities for new applications for personal computing.

The major blank will be exactly how much control Microsoft tries to exercise over it. Its announcement this week that it start rejecting e-mail sent to Hotmail and MSN addresses if it didn't come from domains registered with Microsoft's Sender ID anti-spam scheme doesn't bode well for the notion that Microsoft is becoming more . . . well . . . responsible as it gets older.

"Sender ID" should always be preceded by the word "proprietary." Microsoft is very patiently waiting for the computing community to forget that it torpedoed last year's effort to build a consensus solution to identifying spam by combining its Sender ID with the Sender Profile Framework, which it had endorsed, and Yahoo's Domain Keys under the administrative aegis of the IETF and the terms of the Gnu Public License for open-source software. Microsoft balked at turning over what it claims are patents on using the DNS system or something like it to validate e-mail senders. Why? The only reason I can think of is that Microsoft wants to own the system that stops spam, so it can make a profit on it. I've ranted about this before, but I'll say it again: By refusing to become a participating member of the computing community in the fight against spam Microsoft is marginalizing itself. Outlaws can make money, some even for the long term. But they're still outlaws.

And one more thing, while we're on the subject of Microsoft. I was pleased to see that the company is experimenting with selling desktop management as a service [link http://www.DesktopPipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=164902792 to "selling desktop management as a service"]. It's a move that will upset some Microsoft business partners, but maybe by walking the walk of trying to maintain its products on corporate desktops in a businesslike fashion, Microsoft will learn something about producing a manageable operating system.

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