Hail Storm Warning!

On May 11, 2001, exactly 53 days after its global launch–March 19, 2001 to

be precise–Microsoft India unleashed its latest set of user-centric, XML-based

cross platform Web services HailStorm. While the global launch included

prototypes and demos from MS partners American Express, Clickcomm-erce, eBay,

Expedia, and Groove, the Indian launch had a similar razzmatazz with its Indian

partners showcasing solutions that could address the needs of industry verticals

like education, stock market, health care, B2B exchanges and e-trading. In fact,

Infosys, Mastek, NIIT, Satyam, TCS and Wipro are amongst the first in Asia to

have built applications based on this new technology. However, there is a

difference though. Unlike in India where not many eyebrows are being raised

about the ‘real motive’ of Bill Gates & Co, world over, especially in

the US, HailStorm has lived true its name.

While Microsoft’s competitors, including AOL Time Warner (AOL TW) and Sun

Microsystems, allege that HailStorm and other pieces of the .Net initiative are

designed to limit their access to customers and further leverage Microsoft’s

dominant Windows market share, Gates haters have decried HailStorm for violating

user privacy. Some have even accused Microsoft of mounting yet another assault

on antitrust law. Calling it mis-characterization by special-interest

competitors of its open-access, open-design process vision–unlike AOL’s

walled-garden, proprietary approach to instant messaging, Microsoft denies that

anything in its .Net plan is improper. Rather, the company argues that HailStorm

product is not limited to Windows and can be accessed by consumers running

Linux, Apple’s Macintosh operating system or even on a Palm handheld device.

The company also said HailStorm is built on open standards and is available for

use by any Web site, including AOL. However, Microsoft plans to charge

consumers, developers and participating Websites.

So where did the company falter in its first big move away from a PC-centric

world, or is it just another bout of hue and cry being raised by anti-Microsoft

lobby? The answers lie in understanding what HailStorm is all about and what

prompted the desktop king to come out with it.

What is HailStorm?

Shed of all jargons and flowery verbiage, the new Internet-based software is

a tool that will let people store and manage their personal records. The new

service makes the world’s largest software company’s product a central

repository for storing credit card numbers, financial records, appointment books

and other types of personal information. The company eventually will charge a

yet-to-be-decided monthly fee for the service. The software will also enable

people enter and change their information, store it via the Internet, then

selectively give the information away to contacts, or hawk it when buying goods

and subscribing to services online. Also, the software is supposed to share

information between home computers, work computers, and handheld electronics. It

can move contact information listed from a work e-mail program with contacts

stored in a cell phone.

In simple terms, HailStorm is the first big step for Microsoft’s .Net plan–officially

a set of XML-based services based on user identity and authentication that will

eliminate the need for users to have multiple passwords for Web sites or digital

devices such as Palms and cell phones. Instead, consumers could collect and

store all their information conveniently in one place–definitely with

Microsoft–and this is what has raised the storm in the company’s cup of tea.

There are other issues though.

Why HailStorm?

Critics suggest that HailStorm will give Microsoft a future subscriber base

for services and software. If this works, for instance, these users could be

paying a monthly fee for software and services which they today either buy

one-time, or use free on the Web.

Today, one of Microsoft’s major problems is that many users copy software.

Second, even those who buy software, buy it one-time making it difficult for the

company to sell its upgrade. The world is full of instance where Windows 95 is

still in use despite the fact that the likes of Win 98, Windows 2000 and Windows

ME have been subsequently launched. Forcing people to upgrade is the challenge

and hence experts feel HailStorm is Microsoft’s long-term goal of ensuring

that people pay Microsoft regularly, perhaps a life-long commitment of a monthly

fee.

Experts suggest that while HailStorm will not be exclusive to Microsoft

products, its foundation will use Windows 2000 and Visual Studio.Net. The .Net

enterprise servers and the .Net framework will also definitely make it easier

for developers to create HailStorm services and applications than other

development platforms. So how will Microsoft make money from HailStorm?

Primarily, from the subscription fees that both consumers and corporations will

pay. Bill Gates is reported to have said that some low-level services like the

Passport–most visible in Hotmail–will be free but that others’ fees would

depend on feature ‘richness’ or usage frequency–higher the number of

notifications one receives, the more one pays.

Privacy is a concern

Essentially, .Net is a plan for an ‘operating system for

the Internet’ and Net-based applications. It would offer a set of

Microsoft-controlled programming interfaces for inter-connecting Web-based

applications. On top of this, Microsoft would store customer info–names,

addresses, credit cards, calendars, tasks, favorites, clothing sizes,

preferences, and such–and use Passport to determine which applications and

services should and shouldn’t have access to users’ personal data.

The mere idea of storing all personal data with the company

is a reason enough to send shivers down many a spines. In fact, with the rulings

in one of highest-profile antitrust court cases in history against it, Microsoft

has suffered a major jolt in terms of credibility as a fair player and is

considered the ultimate high-tech bully. Naturally then, despite the fact that

it would be too naive for anybody to even think that the company would collect

and try use customer data in unsavory ways to kill its own product, resistance

has been strong. Not that Microsoft did not expect this. In fact, the company

has taken pains to emphasize in all its documents and communiqués that ‘all

data would belong to the user’.

However, what is worrying experts is the way the HailStorm

would work. The system is based on Microsoft Passport, a service that lets you

enter personal data once and then use it on multiple Web sites. At the moment,

Passport works on the Microsoft Network sites, including free e-mail service

Hotmail, online magazine Slate, the Expedia travel site, as well as about 80

other sites around the Web. Microsoft’s idea with HailStorm is to make

Passport the central authentication system for the entire Web.

Data is Power

Another thing worrying experts is that HailStorm would take cookies, already

a target of privacy advocates. Though cookies can become a potential danger only

if other Web site manages to get hold of it. At the best cookies can inform

Web-site operators whether the user visited the site and, perhaps, what all they

surfed, clicked on and bought. Interestingly, however, a cookie doesn’t

actually tell the site who the user is.

While Passport sites use session cookies, which means the information is

stored with Passport only until the browser is closed, HailStorm with a

worldwide Microsoft Passport service has the potential of changing this all.

According to experts, the gameplan here is to ensure that individual sites do

not collect information about users any more.

The antitrust issues

The anti-Microsoft lobby fears that if all this works, HailStorm could be the

first step to serious Microsoft domination of the Internet, a future where users

will pay Microsoft a fee for many of the services that are available for free on

the Web today or which we today pay for one-time to buy a software product.

AOL TW raised concerns that Microsoft’s new products could create a choke

point on the Internet for e-commerce, instant messaging and downloadable music.

In fact the AOL TW official have gone on record saying that Microsoft’s latest

offerings were an effort "to make sure that eventually there is no reason

to use anything but the versions of programs that Microsoft gives you."

SHUBHENDU PARTH in New Delhi