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Tech-Ed Not For Small Business

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000

At Microsoft's North American Tech-Ed 2000 Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week, the focus was on the new tools the company is creating to help developers maximize the use of the World Wide Web as a business tool.

There was little of overt interest to consumers being discussed at the conference — the bulk of the discussion was about the implementation of the Windows 2000 version of the operating system — but between the lines there were more than a few things that popped up and may have repercussions for home and small business computer users over the next few months and years.

The straight report

Tech-Ed has grown from a single yearly conference with about 3,000 attendees to a series of conferences in North America, England, Europe and elsewhere with over 35,000 people. At the Orlando conference alone, Microsoft says there were over 14,000 developers, programmers, IT managers, and press registered for the four-day event.

At the keynote address on Monday, Microsoft's Chairman and "Chief Software Architect," William Gates III himself, underlined the conference theme — "It's Time to Build the Business Internet" — saying the focus of the conference and of Microsoft in the foreseeable future would be working on the third phase of the Internet.

He described the first phase — and presumably the one that Microsoft originally wrote off as likely a passing phenomenon — as the "Plumbing and Portals" phase where the emphasis was on infrastructure and establishing an online presence. 

He categorized phase two — the state we're in now — as the "Transactions" phase, one step beyond browsing, where people can only visit one site at a time, where information flow is largely one way from screen to user, where input is primarily via keyboard, and one where — despite the amount of business to business transactions — still represents a world where the economy is largely offline.

Gates sees the third phase as — quite naturally — dominated by versions of the Windows operating system, but where the hardware platform becomes less and less relevant. He thinks it will encompass desktop, notebook, and palm-sized computers as well as a marriage of smaller devices including mobile phones with largish screens, wireless organizers, work pads, and all the myriad smaller technological developments to come.

In his future, he sees Internet access that is primarily personalized and accessible from wherever you are, regardless of the device format you use. He sees a Net and software technology that will allow us to pull down information from a variety of sources simultaneously, then meld them into a coherent whole that provides the solution we need at the time.

Keyboard input? Not at all; Gates sees all this taking place through "natural interfaces" such as handwriting recognition and voice. His future Internet would allow the user to read from it, but also to write to it and to annotate what's already there. And he very much sees the global economy being primarily online.

To make this come true, Gates acknowledges that software is only part of the answer and for it to be really useful, it means a wider spread of broadband communications (i.e., higher speed access), greater penetration of wireless technologies, the evolution of smart cards, all small PCs, including the palm-format variety, coming equipped with microphones and cameras to tie into a wider distribution of phones with screens, and the evolution of the work pad (or PC Tablet), Palm and Pocket PC devices, eBooks, and so on.

Heavy betting...

I passed along Gates' comments above largely unannotated because he has the wherewithal to make his visions a reality. I was reminded of a similar campaign of his several years ago when he first described his concept of what a palm-sized "PocketPC" (he used the same term then) would entail. About the only part of the devices he didn't foresee then was the evolution of MP3 music — and the only parts not in today's devices were the complex, beamable codes that would allow you to replace your set of keys with one of these things.

He also predicted you and I would use one of these devices to pay for all our retail purchases, replacing credit cards, ATM cards and cash and while that's not quite here yet, I note that there are some experimental tests going on in Europe where people can use their digital phones to pay for gasoline and vending machine purchases, so I suspect this one isn't that far away.

In the meantime, Microsoft looks to me as though it's betting the ranch on the development of the Windows 2000 series of products. At the conference, the company announced and demonstrated a series of new add-ons to Win2K — so many in fact that Gates acknowledged it was "ambitious" to be announcing so many at once.
But before I describe them, I should remind you that Windows 2000 (Professional, Server, and Advanced Server) are the replacements for Windows NT and as such are largely corporate operating system products. 

The consumer line, stemming from Windows 95 and 98, will continue for one more revision, due out later this summer, and dubbed Windows ME (Millennium Edition).

For the record, let me list the new Win2K server add-ons under the umbrella title of Windows DNA (Dynamic interNet Administration). In roughly the order in which they will be released (starting later this summer and, said one Microid, guaranteed to all be out by June, 2001), they are: 

• Exchange Server 2000 (mail and enhanced Outlook), 
• SQL Server 2000 (data mining), 
• Host Integration Server 2000, 
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000, 
• Application Center Server 2000, 
• Commerce Server 2000 and, 
• BizTalk Server 2000 (to enhance the ability to mine data in other database formats).

In addition to these tools, Microsoft is also working on a product dubbed Visual Studio (a Visual Basic tool that will deal with more languages such as a new variant to be called "C#" (C-sharp). Last, but by no means least, a new rendition of Visio — recently acquired by the company — to be called Visio Enterprise Edition will allow developers to tie all these together, not only conceptually, but also as a real-time development tool that will manipulate and spawn code as they work.

Consumers both in and out

The expectation is that end-use consumers — both corporate knowledge workers and ordinary people trolling the Internet for information, commerce, and entertainment — will benefit from these tools providing a better Internet experience. The corporate IT types are supposed to benefit from a fully integrated development environment that makes bringing products to completion faster and more efficient.

And I think Microsoft has missed the boat on a couple of fronts. One of the little items dropped at the conference by a senior Microsoft spokesperson was that the small business edition of Windows 2000 — due out later this year — won't include the Commerce Server 2000 component (the one you'd use to construct online retail shopping carts, for instance). The other tools are also out of the reach — both in cost and knowledge required to use them — for all but large corporate, institutional, or governmental IT departments with their own direct hardware tie-in to the Internet.

There is nothing here for small retailers, social agencies, or smaller institutions that can't support a department of IT professionals and have to rely on the often spotty services provided by local Internet Service Providers hosting their Web pages.

And frankly, to my mind, those millions of small retailers, unions, non-profit volunteer groups and other agencies, and smaller businesses are the economy. If Microsoft and other companies don't start wondering about how to give these entities the tools to access their envisioned online economy, then all the vaunted talk about the company's new vision statement: "To empower people through software any time, any place, and through any device," will be just that — talk.

Last note

We (the Canadian press contingent who went to the conference) were in the air returning to Toronto when the judge's decision came down ordering Microsoft broken up into two companies. Aside from a rather lame video skit involving Gates and "Judge Judy" shown on the conference main floor, there were no direct references by anyone official to the pending announcement. Among Microsoft employees, however, there were two reactions — both amended by comments such as, "For God's sake, don't use my name!"

Either the person would wax eloquent about not wanting to comment at all, while looking furtively over their shoulder, or the sentiment went something along these lines: "It doesn't matter to me at the moment. If the company has to split into operating systems and other, I'm going to be in (pick one depending on the person). So my job and my life probably won't change."

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