Keynote 2: Microsoft's "three big bets"
After a welcome from the first minister of the government of Catalonia, the
second keynote was presented by Cliff Reeves, vice president of Windows.NET
marketing. He promised to be an interesting speaker having spent his first
120 days at Microsoft after spells at IBM and Sun. Cliff's presentation
centred around what he described as the "three big bets" that Microsoft was
making, as well as demonstrating some of the new .NET Enterprise Server
products.
Bet one was simply a re-iteration of Microsoft's
commitment to deliver software at the enterprise level. Again the emphasis
was on providing software to produce reliable, scalable and manageable
systems. Cliff's benchmark figures showed that the highest performance was
achieved on a Windows platform. He argued that the 'scale out' model, where
the size of a system is increased by adding more identical processors,
promised a new financial model where the cost per transaction was
dramatically lowered.
As Microsoft products become more common in the
data centres of large companies, the demand grows for better systems
management. Microsoft has recently strengthened its portfolio in this area
with the introduction of Microsoft Operations Manager 2000. This is
Microsoft’s “comprehensive solution for data centre management” and
encompasses the knowledge derived from Microsoft’s own .NET Enterprise
Server teams in over 5,000 management pack rules.
Unfortunately, the first embarrassment of the
keynote arrived when Windows.NET product manager, Andrew Ma, tried to
demonstrate it live on stage. Having simulated a situation which previously
would have necessitated walking physically to the data centre to sort out,
MOM 2000 promptly crashed. “Perhaps we’ll have to walk down to the data
centre after all”, commented Andrew.
Microsoft's second bet, according to Cliff, is
that users need help to collaborate with each other. Again Microsoft has a
new product in this area - SharePoint Team Services. This ships with Office
XP Developer and Professional Special Edition, and will be integrated into
.NET. SharePoint allows groups to create an ad hoc work space on the Web for
posting announcements, news of events, discussion boards and sharing
documents. It has full integration with FrontPage, and because it's
Web-based the work space is available from any location. This is a first
attempt at a product that Microsoft thinks will grow in importance: "Expect
SharePoint Team Services to be the first generation", said Cliff.
The third bet is that real world application
development will change to adapt to a world with a huge number of smart
devices. "The server is becoming the new desktop as users move around",
argued Cliff. According to Microsoft, .NET and Web Services will be
fundamental to this new world. Cliff produced benchmarks showing that a
system written in C# using ASP.NET and SQL Server 2000 provided significant
improvements in performance over both rivals (an Oracle 8i Linux-based
system) and old Microsoft technology (VBScript, ASP and SQL Server 2000).
However further embarrassment followed with a
live demonstration of Mobile Information Server. This enables real-time
wireless connectivity to Enterprise servers, and the idea was to demonstrate
how this new product lets users access their Exchange mailbox from their
mobile phone or PDA. Unfortunately, the mobile device failed to make the
necessary connection.
More successful was a demonstration of another
new product, Content Management Server 2001, which allows you to separate
the structure of a Web site from its content. Content is entered into
pre-defined templates and formatted for viewing according to the client
device, so your site can look different on a PDA than on a desktop PC. The
product also incorporates workflow management allowing, for instance,
content to be approved before it's published.
Perhaps the most interesting demonstration of the
keynote was left to last, with a brief look at the next version of SQL
Server, code-named Yukon. This is built on the .NET Common Language Runtime
(CLR) and allows access to Exchange-based data such as messages, contacts
and appointments. Furthermore, stored procedures can be written in any
language supported by the .NET CLR, such as C#, VB.NET or even Cobol.
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Keynote
comment: Jon Honeyball speculates on the future of SQL Server
Comment: keynote shows Microsoft's
maturity
 Keynote interview: Anders Hejlsberg
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