Advogato on MS Strategy: Microsoft's next phase of growth will be driven by Xbox users authenticated via Passport consuming .net hosted services delivered over cable or ADSL to their homes and being billed for those services by the cable or telco company. Only the cable and telco companies have the billing infrastructure and customer relationship to collect micro payments for .net hosted services. Only by disguising the client PC as a games console can MS get into the homes that aren't interested in computers or the Internet per se. By encouraging as many developers as possible onto the .net server platform it will ensure that compelling content and services will be created, and that MS can collect revenues for the delivery of those services. Passport will be used to match the users to the cable company's customer records.

• 2001-05-30 Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft

B

If the proposal for patent laws in EU passes then I invite all small (and big) software companies to publish their software here if it helps them out of problems with american patent laws.

B

Web services? Trying to come up with applications that new web service standards will enable (that can't be done today) has bothered me for over a year now. I can't think of any... not a single service that can't be fixed with today's technology!

• Connect Yahoo! Mail to Netscape Calendar to render the list of emails in a calendar interface
• or get an alert via Lifeminders when your PayPal account balance is below a hundred dollars
• or something...

It's not hard to fix. Connecting services like that is really not hard to fix yet no one does it! Do you know why? I do. It's because those services don't offer us much value. If they did, someone would go through the trouble of implementing them with some old, scrappy tool like Perl or VB or maybe even C++. Imagine.
Will people suddenly start doing it when SOAP is a standard? No. We'll connect those services but not just with some fancy web services tekniko cardinale. We'll stitch the stuff together the way we always do, with some imagination and a couple of lines of code. Of course we'll use XML-RPC, SOAP, .NET but they'll just be small parts of the the huge web that's already there. And people won't use those services unless they offer us some real value. So the web will grow and evolve and as users we'll be blessed with more stuff like Google and Amazon:-)

B