This article has been written over several months, starting before the DOJ reached its decision against Microsoft. This may explain the lurches between widely different topics that occur within. On the other hand, this may reflect how Microsoft is operating at the moment.

Microsoft. Windows 2000 was launched mid-February leaving the usual question of where does it go next, apart from Service Pack 1 of course. Irrespective of the fact that the impending judgement in the Court Case found against Microsoft one cannot help but feel perhaps Microsoft has reached its peak. This has been thought many times in the past and somehow Microsoft have managed to achieve ever bigger profits. I have no doubt that if Windows 2000 does take off in the enterprise market the profits will be healthy for a while to come. However, there are other signs on the horizon. First, Bill Gates is no longer at the head of the organisation, having handed over to Steve Balmer. It is not just Bill though. Several other big names have been leaving Microsoft. Brad Silverman, one of those immortalised in the Windows 3.x gang screen and executive responsible for development of Windows 95 and Internet Explorer, has left to form a startup to provide funding for wireless devices. He took seven former Microsoft managers with him including Nathan Myhrvold and Jonathon Roberts. Nathan was Microsoft's chief technology officer before leaving on a sabbatical about a year ago. Jonathon headed the Windows CE division at one time. After the DOJ ruling Ted Nielson, responsible for close links with the developer community, left the company. These are major names and when such people leave a company one has to wonder why, and is there anyone to replace them? Apart from the loss of staff it is becoming clearer every day that the future is not necessarily PC. Although there is a lot of hype for wireless devices/mobile phones at the moment I still think the biggest challenge comes from the Internet device market. Vapourware products are beginning to appear and some of these are going to become reality. It is not at all clear that Microsoft will drive the software on these devices. Intel itself has one toe in this market and is looking at a Linux based device.

Since writing the above news has filtered through of where Microsoft MAY be trying to go. We already know that the replacement for Windows 98, Windows Millennium is due in late 2000. However, beyond that we are back to codenames. Whistler is the codename for a consumer orientated product which will merge both Windows 9x and Windows 2000 products. It is pencilled in for late 2001. Based on the NT kernel of Windows 2000 it is said to include HTML enhancements (XML?) and a new version of the Microsoft Network Client. Whistler also takes action against applications which replace system DLLs so rendering other applications unable to access the originals. Although there is a merging of Windows 9x and 2000 products it would appear that Whistler will not be suitable for business. The follow up to Windows 2000, codenamed Blackcomb, will appear in 2002/3. Why does there need to be two distinct lines if Whistler uses the Windows 2000 kernel?

I briefly mentioned Windows Millennium above. This is an enhanced version of Windows 98. We have already had Windows 98 second edition and next will come Millennium. What little I have read concerning Millennium seems to be related to yet more decision making by the software. I have mentioned this subject before. I dislike software that tries to make decisions for me and gets it wrong. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get the software to work the way YOU want it. Millennium takes this a bit further by stopping you doing some of the things you did in the past. The first reviews I read of Millennium indicated that it no longer supports real mode operation. Real mode comes from so far back I have forgotten what it means and I guess it has to be ditched sometime. The result will be that certain very old hardware will no longer work with Millennium and I guess that DOS will no longer underpin Windows. Now many may say, "hooray for that", but when I find myself in the brown and sticky stuff DOS can become remarkably handy. I still use DOS Shell on rare occasions when I want to view a file as hex code. It is the quickest way of doing it I know. I was pleased recently to find that DOS Shell, last seen in DOS 5 days, still works under Windows 98 on my FAT32 formatted drives. Of course, if Windows Millennium crashes you really are stuck. No going into DOS and solving it at that level.

Just recently, news of another piece of functionality that had been dropped by Millennium came crawling out of the woodwork. In point of fact it was quietly dropped from Windows 2000. Andrew Thomas at The Register reported that both Windows 2K and Millennium will no longer format floppies as system disks. "So what", I hear you say. Well, for a start it disabled the capability to upgrade your BIOS. The Intel upgrade process is now totally automated and runs out of AUTOEXEC.BAT. The reason for this being that almost all upgrades now involve rewriting the boot block flash - any interruption to this process can result in the flash being corrupted and the motherboard rendered unusable - hardly a trivial problem.. When they were told about the problem by the Register, Intel worked on a solution for some motherboards. The BX motherboard is not among those that get the new Intel utility but Intel will be shipping a freeware DOS look-a-like to allow users of BX boards to create a bootable floppy.

Microsoft have been very thorough when you try to get round the problem of creating a system floppy. If you try the command:

sys a:

You get the error message:

You can only SYS drive C: to try and repair the boot hard disk.
Use the Startup Disk option in Add/Remove programs to create an emergency boot disk.

If you try:

format a: /s

You get the message:

Microsoft Windows no longer supports the format /s command.
To create a Startup Disk, click the Add/Remove Programs icon in Control Panel.
Format terminated.

If you try to use the Windows 98 Second Edition version of Format Millennium will not execute it giving an 'incorrect DOS version' message.

Microsoft seem to think that the only reason for wanting to create a system floppy is to create an emergency startup disk - which is allowed, as the error messages tell you. However, when you do this the floppy created has just under a quarter of a MB of free space. You have to know how and what to delete to make space for files. OK, a seasoned professional is going to know what to do but it is a bit tedious.

After I read about Whistler and Blackcomb I thought I knew where Microsoft was going. I must say that, as it seemed to be dumbing down the OS more and making it even more difficult to use by a nerd, I was not happy. Then Microsoft lined up another grand announcement which sent me into a tailspin again.

Originally delayed, in case it was overshadowed by announcements from the trial judge, Microsoft announced its .Net strategy two weeks later than planned. Since its announcement I have been trying to make sense of what it is. I think before trying to explain .Net we have to look at the concept of an ASP. This has been talked up a lot lately. It stands for Application Service Provider. In the same way that an ISP, the Internet Service Provider, provides access to the Internet so the ASP provides access to applications. This is generally regarded as hosting the applications on a central computer linked via a TCP/IP network, usually the Internet, to users of the applications. The applications themselves do not reside on users' computers. In fact they do not buy or own applications at all. They pay to use the applications, like a rental charge. The primary advantage of this philosophy is that the user, generally a business, does not have the problem of software upgrades any more. In fact they do not have the problem of supporting the software at all. The ASP does all that. The downside is that you never own the software. You will be constantly paying to use it. Once software is mature this is very handy for the ASPs! To me the ASP has no value to the individual home user although that may change if it was cheap enough and the Internet was cheap enough and fast enough.

Both Sun and Microsoft have stated their intentions to be ASPs for their own products so that, for example, you could rent usage of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft have decided that the ASP model is the future of computing and their .Net strategy is their means to embrace it. The .Net strategy is the means by which any business becomes an ASP providing its specific applications to users, who use the browser as the working interface. The browser becomes very important. It is not just integrated into the operating system, which the DOJ found so objectionable. To the user it virtually IS the operating system. It is integrated not just into PCs but any device that accesses the .Net. An example of how the .Net might work is to consider a company who have a computerised billing system. They may wish to make money by allowing their business partners to use the billing system as well, by accessing the Internet or an Extranet. This is typical Gates logic. In the past a company would have GIVEN a copy of the software to their partners. Now they expect their partners to pay for the privilege.

The browser in the .Net strategy will be using XML, the future version of HTML that the Worldwide Web Consortium are working on. Microsoft will provide the tools for developing the services that are provided on the .Net. Currently web services are built up in Java, Visual Basic and various other languages. The .Net approach is to use standard, Microsoft produced, tools that will make the process quicker. The first of these, Web Forms, was released at the time of the .Net announcement. Visual BASIC is being extended to allow developers to turn Visual BASIC functions into online services. A language C#, (that's C-Sharp), is being developed ,which Microsoft hope will kill Java. The way the user accesses the service is not reliant on using Windows, or any other platform. You need a browser and a protocol to communicate. The protocol defined in the .Net strategy is SOAP, (Simple Object Application Protocol), which is another standard being developed at present. Microsoft are also planning to produce an application designer tool to aid a business analyst to model the business processes. This tool will be based on Visio, which Microsoft now own.

Well, that is the idea. The question is will anyone want it? At the moment there is no clue how business will react but the way they are happy to outsource just about anything these days suggests they will be happy to outsource their software development and rent their software to avoid support costs. I am fairly sure it is completely useless to us at home, at least until cheap broadband access to the Internet is a reality. Even then I am not sure I would want to pay every time I wanted to write a letter. I am happy to have my personal copy of Microsoft Office, well I would be if it would let me get on with what I want to do. The big question for the long term is will we be able to buy off the shelf software if the .Net strategy succeeds?

Microsoft certainly think the .Net strategy is the way forward. They are upping R & D budgets by 16% to get it going. Bill Gates said, in a briefing to Wall Street analysts:

'Net will provide a platform for speech and handwriting recognition, microphones and cameras on computers, online music, video and photos and wireless and broadband access to be integrated to provide an amazing Internet experience. Building that platform is something we have taken up uniquely. It is only because of what we have done over the last eight years that we have a unique opportunity to pull these things together. We have to do exactly what we did with Windows.'

I've heard all this stuff about speech and handwriting recognition before. Remember Pen for Windows? I found what he said after more revealing:

'Even where we do not do the operating system, we will have a layer of software, that in some cases people will pay for, that will connect them to the .Net platform.'

There it is then. Bill Gates has admitted that people might use an OS other than Windows so the purpose of .Net is to introduce another layer of software that Microsoft will dominate. And what is this .Net platform? Surely that exists as the Internet, or is Bill trying to replace that as well?