'We are transparent, and as open as we realistically can be'

Lots of Indians are doing well at Microsoft. The corporate VP of the

Developer Division, S Somasegar, was one of the first men of Indian

origin to become an officer of the company. He joined 17 years ago and

spent the first 15 years with Windows, seeing through seven different

releases. In a strategic role now, he keeps himself busy getting

developers excited about the Microsoft platform. In an interview with

Goutam Das of Dataquest, he talks about new releases, open source and

the changing paradigm in the Web services war. 

 

  Java still has a hold over the enterprise, primarily at

the back end, while Microsoft remains strong on the desktop and at the

small enterprise level. Do you see this equation changing?



I think the equation has changed. If you talk to any of the third

party independent analyst firms, they would say more people today are

taking a bet on .Net for their enterprise needs than Java. Forester, last

year, talked to large enterprises across North America-companies

employing over 5,000 people-and said more than 50% of the enterprises

they talked to were for the .Net platform. Gartner put Microsoft and .Net

in what they called the Magical Quadrant, which is a set of technologies

truly ready for the enterprise. Yet another analyst firm talked to

enterprise customers worldwide-35% of the respondents said they were

using .Net for mission critical needs; 25%, J2EE; 16%, mainframes; 16%,

pre .Net version of Windows; and 8% were using some flavor of Unix. 

      Will Microsoft come out

with an official announcement regarding its intention to support the full

.Net framework beyond Windows?



We are a platform company and our platform is Windows. Every year we

talk about what we think about cross platform. But, so far, there are no

plans to take .Net to other platforms. 

      Efforts to interoperate

between Sun's Solaris operating system and Java and Windows and .Net

have been going on for some time. In this regard, how significant is

Sun's latest announcement to develop and distribute open source versions

of industry-wide Web services specification to boost interoperability?



In some sense, Microsoft and IBM have taken the first steps years ago.

We said we would jointly work on WS-* Specifications, which are

industry-wide open specifications for anybody who wants to develop and

deploy Web services. We also have been working with a host of other

people. If Sun is talking about it now, it's great. They are as

important as anybody else when it comes to interoperability. But we have

been careful that when we talk about Web services, we do want to have an

open industry specification, which we call the WS-*. We also took a bet of

XML as the common data exchange format to make sure we can interoperate

and exchange data from one system to the other.

      Microsoft has been

sharing source code in the form of MFC libraries and ASP.Net starter kits.

Do you see the gap between you and the open source movement bridging?



People want access to source code for a variety of reasons. Some of it

is because they want to have a comfort and security saying if something

happens to Microsoft, they shouldn't be left in the lurch. There are

another category of people who say 'I am going to build something on top

of you, and the more I understand you, the more easy it will be for me to

develop and debug the applications on top of you'. The third category

says they want to tweak what we are building-add something, extend or

change. We do understand all these three categories and we have the Share

Source License Programs, both with governments around the world, and with

enterprise customers for the first and second categories. The third

category is where we struggle with the model. The IP issue comes into

play.



When we develop software we think about the world as our customer base,
and literally, it is used by millions of people. And we need to be

super-thoughtful when we make a change to that so that we don't cause

security or quality issues. We don't know how we can get n number of

people randomly extending, tweaking and still be able to deliver to our

customer base and know it will continue working. We don't know how to

make that work. But there is one learning for the Open Source community.  They have done a great job figuring out how to build a

community around whatever they are doing and it has helped them build

better products. If you look at Microsoft as a company, the Developer

Division is taking a leadership role in terms of working with the

community, being transparent, involving the community in product

development and be as open as we realistically can be so that we can get

feedbacks in timely manner. 






What's the update on the partner ecosystem in India?




There are multiple ways you can think about partners. You can think of

them as ISV partners, you can think about them as SI partners, you

can think of them as smaller SIs who work with smaller shops. The SI

ecosystem is getting stronger. The SIs in India are truly becoming

        global players and so the

impact and influence that they have on technology adoption and deployment

and access around the world, is

          becoming huge. We

have a great partnership with the SIs here. The ISV ecosystem is still

growing and getting stronger. i-Flex is a great ISV success story in

India. You can probably count the number of successful ISV stories at a

global level today. We have a developer platform evangelism organization

in India and these guys are focused on figuring out how we can work with

the local software ecosystem at the ISV level, at the SI, academic level,

getting them access to technology and the right people so that they can do

better. Recently, we increased our investments in the developer platform

evangelism platform in India to make sure we are partnering with the local

ecosystem. One example is the launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server

2005. As part of getting ready for the launch, we worked with the local

ISVs and SIs and got a whole number of people trained on these

technologies and products so they are ready to build applications

themselves or work better with their customers. 






Let's talk about your latest release — Visual Studio 2005. You said it
was the best Visual Studio and .Net framework release

      ever done. Why do you think so?





Visual Studio has always been a great set of tools for the

professional developer. If you look at the professional developer space

and ask       them what they care about the most,

they always say that productivity is way high on the list. Visual Studio

2005, just from the productivity    perspective, on an average,

a developer, whether he is building a Web application or an application

for a device, they have to write 50 to      70 % less

code for lot of the common scenarios they care about than Visual Studio

2003 or any other previous versions of products. We

     also added for the first time in Visual Studio

2005 a set of products that go beyond the professional developer. On the

lower end, we have a set of products targeted at the non professional

developer. On the higher end, for the lifecycle tools, we have three

products - a set of tools targeted at the developers, a set of tolls

targeted at the testers and a set of tools targeted at the designer or

architect in an organization. So we have extended the reach of Visual

Studio products all the way from the non professional developer to the

team or enterprise developer. The other thing is the .Net framework where

we have made phenomenal improvements in performance. We get 40% higher

performance in .Net 2.2 than .Net 1.1.