Comments on: Gates memo: Brace for 'services wave'

Microsoft chairman tells staff "to lead, we need to do far more," as company faces up to online rivals.

[Panamon]

What is the role of your partners...

Bill,

Great to hear that you have not forgotten about your partners.

We the partners would like to know what will be our role for your web services.

Please let us know?

Thanks,

Mr. Mister

[Don_Dodge]

The Coming Web Services Tsunami - Microsoft is ready to surf

Microsoft entering the web based service market is a big change, similar to the Internet Wave change the company made back in 1995. The result of that change was the introduction of Internet Explorer which came from nowhere to market leadership in less than 5 years.

Microsoft is a 30 year old company that can still make dramatic changes quickly. Microsoft seems to do it every 5 years. I wrote a blog a few months ago that got lots of attention inside Microsoft, entitled "The Coming Web Services Tsunami". You can read the whole story here.
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/09/the_coming_web_.html

[Earl Benser]

MS damned near drowned....

... in the Internet Wave, And in the desperate attempt to stay
afloat, we got Internet Explorer welded into Windows, IE was a
defective browser since MS paid little attention to W3C standards
(or to Java standards either) and it was basically unfixable since
it was used to carry key Windows code as well as work the
Internet. After all, MS couldn't allow the WIndows user not to
install IE.

So now there is a 'second tsunami' coming. I wonder just how
hard MS will slam into the bottom this time before they get it
figured out, if they get it figured out correctly.

There's a major risk that this 'service market' is going to be as
much quicksand as real opportunities.

[Razzl]

tilting at windmills

Bill Gates' instincts on the future of computing has not been unfailing at all stages. Remember the .NET disaster that accompanied the release of WinXP, where Gates believed Microsoft was going to move into for-pay services? It turned out the for-pay concept was not what the broad public was interested in, and the details of how to provide it were not created with any understanding of what that would look like from the end-user's point of view (or even who the end-user might be). The public's disinterest in online delivery of movies or pay-per-view for cable tv shows indicates a sharp dropoff of interest in anything transactions that are too complex, expensive, or insecure.

I can tell you as an experienced end-user, both at home and in an academic environment, that there will be no "Tsunami" of customers for much of what Gates is envisioning. Here at ground level us home users are pulling back from even simple "live" transactions like banking, buying, and email until security and privacy issues are handled to a high degree of safety. Who is going to start doing networked word processing and document storage in this type of environment? And all PC's in use and on the market already come loaded with those programs. Why risk having your data in the hands of a third party when transmitting or reading from local files is so transparent in the XP OS? The security track record of all current providers of web services such as banking or commerce right now is pathetic.

Bill has a persistent vision of grabbing big bucks for some kind of subscription models of everything Microsoft does, but the public, even including logical constituencies like businesses, has shown little interest in "pay to play live" models. The whole idea, if you'll pardon the pun, is a little "Dodgey"...