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ObjectWatch Newsletter # 44 CONTENTS
SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATIONFeel free to forward this newsletter, but don't make any changes. Thanks. There are now over 18,000 subscribers to this newsletter and over 70,000 readers! To find out about sponsoring an ObjectWatch Newsletter, contact janet at objectwatch.com. For your own free email subscription, send mail to sub@objectwatch.com saying: subscribe your-name, your-email For example, subscribe William Shakespeare,william@objectwatch.com To unsubscribe, send mail to sub@objectwatch.com saying unsubscribe your-name, your e-mail QUOTATION OF THE MONTH: BEING BLUNT“But Java programmers have been urging Sun to match Microsoft's programming tools, said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president for software. Those programmers ‘have been pushing us to drive a level of ease-of-use and productivity that, to be blunt, Microsoft set the bar for, with Visual Studio’, he said.“ - Sun Raves over Java’s simple weak spot, But don’t expect a fix this year…by Stephen Shankland in Silicon.com, 10 June 2003. (http://www.silicon.com/news/500003/1/4586.html?et=search) The winner of the Quotation of the Month Contest is John Sutcliffe who gets a choice of a personally autographed copy of Roger Sessions's just released book, " Software Fortresses; Modeling Enterprise Architectures", or the ObjectWatch BBQ apron. Send in your nominations for Quotation of the Month to roger at objectwatch.com, and you too can get a personally autographed book/apron! NEW WHITE PAPER AVAILABLE FROM OBJECTWATCHRoger Sessions has been working over two months on his latest white paper. The white paper is titled “Modeling Software Architectures and Platform Choices” and you can download it free from www.objectwatch.com. If you have read any of Roger’s white papers, you know they are thought provoking, controversial, and erudite. This white paper introduces a new approach for analyzing enterprise system cost. This approach is called the Software Fortress Enterprise Planning Process (SF-EPP). As you can imagine, it is based on the Software Fortress Model. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of this white paper is that it has an accompanying spreadsheet that you can use as the basis for your own enterprise analysis. This white paper is particularly valuable for corporations seeking to compare IBM’s WebSphere to Microsoft’s Windows Server Platform but the methodology it introduces is applicable to any technology comparisons. You can download the 73 page white paper and accompanying spreadsheet by going to www.objectwatch.com and looking for the link to ObjectWatch White Papers. MAIN ARTICLE: THOUGHTS FROM MICROSOFT'S TECH-EDYou couldn’t miss Janet. Even with the ten thousand or so attendees, Janet stood out. In part, this was due to Janet’s eccentric dress habit. Janet, you see, wears tie dye. This, however, would not in itself make Janet stand out at Tech-Ed. The fact that Janet stood out among the other attendees is as much due to what the rest of the attendees were NOT wearing as much as to what she WAS wearing. What they were not wearing was color. No reds, purples, or pinks. Nary an orange among them. It was as if ten thousand tech heads were competing to discover the dingiest shade of grey and the most boring possible blue. When Janet walked by in her swirling yellows, oranges, and greens, she stood out like a flower in the desert. I, on the other hand, with my grey slacks and dull tan shirt, fit in perfectly. Color was not the only thing missing at this Tech-Ed. There were quite a few conspicuous absences. In fact, in many ways, this Tech-Ed was defined by what was not there as much as by what was. Here is my personal list of the most conspicuous absences:
Let me take you through each of these. NO EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTSThe most exciting product news was that Windows.NET is now known as the Windows Server System. And if you think that is exciting, I suggest you get a real life. I am sure that all of the Microsoft presenters had a grand time taking last year’s slides and doing a global find-and-replace of “Windows.NET” by “Windows Server System”. Other than the name change, they certainly didn’t seem to change much else. By the way, I wouldn’t get too attached to this name. Given that “Windows Server System” is a strong contender for the worst name Microsoft marketing has yet come up with (not an insignificant accomplishment, given the fierce competition in this area), I expect it to last no more than six months. Personally, I am holding onto my “Windows.NET” slides until further notice. NO VERY IMPORTANT SPEAKERSNo Bill Gates. Not even a Steve “the bad guy” Ballmer. All we got for the opening keynote was Paul Flessner, the Senior Vice President of the Windows Server System Division. No substance here, mostly platitudes on a recent article on the commoditization of IT. In my view, IT may or may not be commoditized, but discussion on the commoditization of IT has certainly been commoditized. The second day keynote was by Scott Charney, Microsoft’s Chief Security Strategist. The most noteworthy part of his presentation was that he was actually wearing a suit! AND he is middle-aged. Middle-aged and a suit is a highly unusual combination at Microsoft and probably makes Charney one of the few people at Microsoft who can actually have credibility in front of a corporate CxO. NO KERBEROSGiven that security was a significant topic of the conference (as evidenced by Charney’s appearance in day two), you might have expected a lot of discussion about Kerberos. At the last PDC (Microsoft’s other major conference), Microsoft made quite a big deal about the fact that it was adopting the industry standard Kerberos as its primary security standard. Apparently, Kerberos is now out of favor at Microsoft. At this year’s conference, everything was PKI (public key infrastructure). Charney discussed PKI often and announced a new partnership with VeriSign, one of the leaders in PKI technology. You might think that the switch from Kerberos to PKI is a minor issue. After all, one standard or another, who cares? But Kerberos and PKI are two entirely different approaches to security. Kerberos is a private key system. It works through a shared secret. Only you and the Kerberos system know your little secret. You convince the Kerberos system that you are who you say you are by whispering the shared secret in its ear. PKI is a public/private key combination system. There are no shared secrets. The public key unlocks information locked with your private key. You don’t share your private key with anybody, not even the PKI system. The PKI system is only used to guarantee that your public key is really YOUR public key. You convince somebody (not the PKI system) that you are who you say you are by sending them a PKI guaranteed public key that unlocks the information you locked with your private key. You can see that Kerberos and PKI are very different security models. It would have been interesting to hear Charney discuss why Microsoft decided to abandon Kerberos (if, in fact, it has made that decision) and the implications of the switch from Kerberos to PKI. I, for one, have no problem with PKI. I consider it a superior model to Kerberos. But I would have liked to have heard Charney’s views on the subject. Unfortunately, the only discussion about Kerberos was the null discussion. Kerberos? What Kerberos? NO MICROSOFT CONSULTING SERVICESAs a Tech-Ed attendee, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft even HAS a consulting services. When Paul Flessner (day one keynote) wanted a consultant to discuss integration and interoperability, he didn’t choose a consultant from MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services), he chose Jon Rauschenberger from Clarity Consulting. When Flessner introduced Pac Life’s usage of Microsoft technologies, the consultant who helped them build their system was not an MCS consultant, but Tim Huckaby from InterKnowlogy. Both Rauschenberger and Huckaby are highly competent consultants. Both are Microsoft Regional Directors, which makes them very special. However there is a serious problem with the picture Microsoft is presenting. Both Clarity Consulting and InterKnowlogy are young, small companies. Neither is more than ten years old. I doubt that between the two of them they have more than 100 employees. Large established companies do not want to be trusting their mission critical systems to young, small consulting companies. They want to be working with large, established organizations. An organization like Microsoft. Unfortunately, Microsoft Consulting Services does not do consulting. At least, that was the message of Tech-Ed. If you want ongoing consulting, you go to a small startup consulting company, such as Clarity or InterKnowlogy, that, chances are, you never heard of until ten minutes ago. Imagine that you are a corporate CTO. You are trying to choose between buying Microsoft or IBM technology. Here is the Microsoft picture. You are barely convinced that Microsoft is enterprise ready in the first place (isn’t Microsoft the company that makes XBoxes?). And if you do choose to use Microsoft technology, you are being asked to trust your entire IT organization to a ten person consulting group that probably didn’t even exist back when you were drinking your morning doppio. Here is the IBM picture. You know that IBM knows the enterprise. After all, they practically invented enterprise computing. And if you use IBM technology, IBM provides the consulting services. Even the name of the IBM consulting services sounds impressive: IBM Global Services! Wow! Which are you going to choose? IBM technology and IBM Global Services? Or Microsoft technology and Joe’s Consultants R Us? Microsoft has always had an ambivalent relationship with its MCS organization. From a profit perspective, Microsoft is enamored with the software business model. The software business model states that once you invest tons of money in a product, you get to produce CDs for twenty cents each and sell them for hundreds or thousands of dollars. If you ignore for a moment the huge development costs, you are basically selling disks for a 1,000,000% plus markup. Consultants do not fit the software business model. You can only sell consultants for a 100% markup, probably less. This is a far cry from the 1,000,000 % markup of software CDs. You can almost hear Steve Ballmer yelling, “What? Out of every one thousand dollars in consulting income I only make five hundred dollars? And why do I want to be in the ---- consulting business?” There is a major flaw in Microsoft’s thinking here. Consultants do much more than consult. They also own customer relationships. And these customer relationships drive product sales. IBM doesn’t sell its WebSphere technology because it is better than Microsoft’s (I don’t believe it is). It certainly doesn’t sell WebSphere because it is cheaper. The reason IBM sells WebSphere is because there are 60,000 IBM Global Service consultants out there in the world and every one of them is recommending that his or her customers buy more WebSphere products. Until Microsoft recognizes the value of consulting services it will be hampered in the enterprise space. Unfortunately, the only thing we heard about Microsoft Consulting Services at the Tech-Ed was, “Consulting Services? What Consulting Services?” NO ARCHITECTUREArchitectural design is the single most critical phase of large enterprise systems deployment. The good news is that there were many sessions at Tech-Ed dedicated to discussing architecture. The bad news is that none of them actually discussed architecture. Apparently, Microsoft thinks the word “architecture” means “technology”. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. Architecture has nothing to do with technology. Architecture is about how you think about enterprise systems. Technology is about how you build those systems. It is critically important that people understand the basic architectural principals of designing large enterprise systems. Until they do, we will continue to have enterprise systems that do not scale, do not interoperate, and are not secure. Unfortunately, the only thing we heard about architecture at the Tech-Ed was, “Architecture? What’s Architecture?” NO HALF AND HALFNeed I say more? Another year of non-dairy creamer. Not only do I NOT get my morning doppio macchiatos, but I am reduced to picking cherries out of the Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream so I can use the melted remains as a sorry excuse for cream in my coffee. No wonder I’m in a bad mood! BUT THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER YEARI am the eternal optimist. If Microsoft holds another Tech-Ed next year, I’m sure I’ll be there. I always am. Maybe next year, Microsoft will make some important product announcements along with the by now obligatory major name changes. Maybe next year, Microsoft will talk about the importance of its consulting services and the tight relationships its consultants form with corporate customers. Maybe next year, we will have real half and half for our coffee. Maybe next year, Microsoft will send a Very Important Speaker. Maybe even Bill himself will be there. If he is, I hope he wears tie dye. - Roger Sessions JANET’S VIEW OF TECH-EDWe thought you would appreciate a non-techies view of Tech-Ed. We are a little nervous about this. When Janet sent out her poem telling people she would be at Tech-Ed, we got three Very Nasty Letters, thirty pieces of fan mail, and one marriage proposal. So we are probably taking a chance with this, but here goes! ... Tech-Ed, oh Tech-Ed, was not such a bore, - Janet of ObjectWatch OBJECTWATCH SERVICESLet ObjectWatch and Roger Sessions help your company be successful. Here are some of the services we offer:
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Just write Janet (at objectwatch.com) and let her put together a program that meets your specific needs. Legal Notices:The ObjectWatch Newsletter does not rent out its subscription list. ObjectWatch accepts one sponsoring advertisement per issue. To find out about sponsoring an ObjectWatch Newsletter, contact janet at objectwatch.com. This newsletter is Copyright (c) 2003 by ObjectWatch, Inc., Austin, Texas. All rights are reserved, except that it may be freely redistributed provided that it is redistributed in its entirety, and that absolutely no changes are made in any way, including the removal of these legal notices. ObjectWatch is a registered trademark (r) of ObjectWatch, Inc., Austin, Texas. Software Fortress is a trademark (tm) of ObjectWatch, Inc., Austin Texas. All other trademarks are owned by their respective companies.
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