ActiveX’s move looks spurious to industry watchers

New York (October 14, 1996) — Unless you’ve been living in a cave not equipped with a modem recently, you’ve already heard about Microsoft handing over parental control of its ActiveX, COM, and DCOM technology to The Open Group (TOG), the recently formed standards body resulting from the merger of the ailing Open Software Foundation (OSF) and the X/Open Co., the repository of the trademark for “UNIX.”

According to TOG, the proposed Active Group, which will manage the evolution of ActiveX Core technologies, will be headed by a steering committee consisting of system, application, and tools vendors and customers. It will be composed of standing and rotating members. The initial standing members of the group include Adobe Systems, Computer Associates, Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Lotus Development, NCR Corp., SAP AG, Siemens Nixdorf, Software AG, and Sybase’s Powersoft division. Additionally, Borland International, Sheridan Software Systems, VideoSoft, Visio, and Wall Data signed on for one-year stints as rotating members.

The move immediately pumps oxygen into the new standards body. And the new parents, who have defined the mission for a new entity called The Active Group, are eager adopters. Not only does TOG take over the reins of a software regime in which Microsoft has invested 00 million over the last seven years, but the word from one Microsoft executive who spoke off the record is that the company will soon join the board of TOG, paying million for the seat.

The main task before TOG, of course, is to standardize the linking of front-end Windows PCs to the massive data available primarily in non-Windows back-end systems. The Open Group intends “to manage the cross-platform evolution of ActiveX technologies, to improve interoperability with other environments, and to incorporate a wider cross-section of customers and industry in the evolution of these technologies.”

By opening up ActiveX, Microsoft strives to make its heretofore proprietary network-oriented component integration technology more attractive to developers who currently favor open technologies such as JavaSoft’s forthcoming Java component API (JavaBeans), the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), and the OMG’s CORBA-based Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) — a standard for distributed object communication on the Internet supported by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems, among others. These technologies lack ActiveX’s Windows-centric heritage and support a wide range of platforms and operating systems.

Also involved in the open standards question is the issue of OpenDoc, an industry standard from the OMG and Component Integration Laboratories. Closely aligned with efforts at IBM and Apple Computer, OpenDoc has recently been implemented in IBM’s Arabica technology, which supports Sun’s JavaBean’s initiative (which will be finalized this week); also recently, following the announcement that Sun and Apple will create an integrated line of products for the Internet and corporate intranets, Sun executives suggested Sun and Apple might work to create a common code base for Java and OpenDoc.

“What Microsoft is turning over are the [ActiveX] source and binary codes and specs, as well as reference implementations and conformance test suites,” explained James R. Bell, CEO of The Open Group. “The Open Group provides is a fair and equitable means of licensing and distribution. Licensees will have to agree to pool relevant intellectual property; in return, they will receive standardized branding and certification procedures.”

“Interoperability is the key for success in the realm of network computing, but the Internet is a very market-driven phenomenon,” said Jamie Lewis of the Burton Group, selected by Microsoft to moderate the October 1 meeting of stakeholders. “So the test for Microsoft and The Open Group is to make a successful transition to an open systems strategy. Obviously, IIOP and CORBA are not going to go away. But the mistake of the past has been to get into a religious war over standards. And this is a mistake the industry cannot afford to make again.”

But will another religious war break out, in which a standards body championed by Microsoft tilts at a standards body championed by Netscape and other competitors? The odds-on betting among industry cognoscenti after the meeting was that it is only a matter of time, unless The Open Group, based in Cambridge, MA, is willing to commit to negotiations with the OMG, its robust chief rival and one of the world’s largest software standards bodies, based in nearby Framingham, MA. And, in an ad hoc polling of ISV representatives, technical analysts, and programmers, reactions to the news of Microsoft’s transfer of its rights to ActiveX to TOG ranged from the charitably diplomatic to the downright cynical.

Peaceful coexistence?

“We’re delighted that Microsoft sees the value of an open standardization process based on consensus, and we hope that both they and The Open Group realize that years of user and vendor consensus have already gone into the Object Management Architecture, CORBA, and IIOP,” said Richard M. Stoley, chief science officer of the OMG. “Whatever comes from this new effort and however it is composed, OMG will ensure standardized interoperability with it as we have with COM and DCOM in the past. Much more important will be how the user gets the most out of Java-based systems, CORBA systems, and ActiveX immediately.”

“More important to OMG at the moment is Java and Java Services integration with CORBA and CORBA services, given that ActiveX — at least large parts of it — are not commercially available,” said Christopher M. Stone, CEO of the OMG. “As far as cooperation or coopetition I believe you will see a little of both down the road.”

While some Java enthusiasts perceive ActiveX and COM as competing technologies, others consider the two standards complementary. “I think Java and COM go together very well,” said Don Box, an executive at DevelopMentor Corp. and a noted C++ guru. “In fact, Java is easily the most COM-friendly language, hands down. Which is really ironic, considering where they came from. So I don’t feel that it’s an either/or situation. The good news is that the people at The Open Group are adults, they’ve been around, and they know what they’re doing. So let’s see what happens.”

“This shows that people are starting to cooperate to create a market,” said Carl Cargill, a standards strategist for Netscape, an affiliate with the OMG. “And then compete once that market has been created. Which is a good thing. If the OMG and the group here can merge on this, we will. I don’t want to get into another standards war. Standards bodies are created for cooperation and not for competition — look at the W3C. The marketplace is really the place for competition.”

Open warpath?

“The only difference between this meeting and a Bob Dole rally was that Microsoft didn’t hand out campaign buttons,” said Mike McCamon, director of product management for Visual Components, one of the voting enterprises working with both ActiveX and Java. “It’s not hard to see what they [the buttons] would have read: ‘You Can Trust ActiveX, You Can’t Trust Java.’ I think it was a political move, literally. Now Microsoft can say, ‘Look, we gathered these ISVs together and put the issue to a vote, and TOG was chosen: So there is nothing that is going to prevent ActiveX from becoming the new standard’.”

“Gates gave everyone a choice of either Microsoft controlling ActiveX or an organization hand-picked by the company — no alternative was offered,” said industry consultant Frank D. Greco, president of Crossroads Technologies. “Doesn’t that make you wince? The members of the Open Group are allied with the PC platform, which makes any non-PC implementation of the ActiveX specification a distant thought. Any other implementation would have to make performance or functional concessions to the spec. Standardization can be good or bad. ActiveX is not a bad technology per se, its just that it truly can only run in a Windows architecture. And that is anathema to the philosophy of the Net.”

“Microsoft’s standards effort, like many standards efforts, should be interpreted entirely as a political, not a technical, initiative,” said David Koosis, technical director for ISC Consultants and co-author of Java Programming for Dummies. “In the absence of strong, savvy software competitors, Microsoft has an abysmal record as far as open standards are concerned. They can’t restrain themselves from coopting standards to fit their own short-term strategic advantage. While Microsoft bashes Java for security holes, the proposed alternative, ActiveX, has no built-in security. Are we to assume that a trusted ActiveX component won’t accidentally or maliciously cause harm? If an ActiveX component comes from a trusted vendor, say Microsoft, can I rest assured that the component won’t overwrite TCP/IP DLLs upon which competing products depend? I think there’s a real place for ActiveX, but from its execution I see that its standards effort is purely a sophisticated and cynical marketing campaign.”

“Why is CORBA not good enough for Microsoft?” lamented Erik Radmall, technical partner at i33 Communications, a Web content house in New York. “It was developed with input from a wide variety of vendors, and the OMG has had years to define and refine the specification. I don’t see a lowest-common-denominator committee result in the CORBA design. Rather, I see a specification that’s open enough to bridge disparate architectures and truly genericize the idea of networked applications, in the same way the TCP/IP and HTTP have. OLE/DCOM, on the other hand, was developed in a vacuum by one company. It hasn’t been subjected to the scrutiny that CORBA has, and there hasn’t been enough buy-in from other hardware and software vendors to make it a viable competitor yet. Though there’s no doubt that if Microsoft wishes to create a standard, it will pour enough money into it to make one. The gist is: who needs yet another incompatible architecture? The point of CORBA was to make networked systems talk seamlessly. The last thing we need is another API to worry about.”

“Gates thrives on control,” said Greco. “It’s been his business philosophy for years; it’s how Microsoft has been successful. He is a brilliant strategist but a mediocre technologist. The thought of Microsoft asking us to accept ActiveX as a standard for Internet programming is just laughable, as ActiveX is inherently insecure — digital signatures don’t prevent bugs from trashing your machine. On the other hand, historically, the OMG has not been as influential as it originally hoped; it doesn’t do a good job marketing itself. If it weren’t for Netscape looking for a way to combat any distributed technology from Microsoft, the OMG may have withered on the vine, like the OSF. Certainly the failure of OpenStep hasn’t helped OMG.”

A year from now?

“Come back a year from now and Java will have made everything that happened here today ancient history,” said Jeffrey P. Morgenthal, a research analyst at D. H. Brown Associates, in Port Chester, NY. “Microsoft, in attempting to avoid a perceived religious war, obviously thinks that they are going to come across as heroes for doing this. They’re not. The technology that they are giving away is simply not that good, while other technologies truly are. You have OMG’s CORBA, which is the currently preferred object specification, and then you have the up-and-coming Java online vision. Personally, I think the long-term winner in all of this, for many reasons, is going to look a lot like Java.”

During the stakeholders’ meeting, Netscape’s Carl Cargill was the only ISV representative to put forth the question of a possible future merger of the IIOP/CORBA and COM/DCOM technologies, asking whether TOG could work together with OMG on fusing their efforts toward universal interoperability between all platforms. “I think you would get a remarkable synergy if you could manage to merge the two,” noted Cargill. “However, if you do not merge the two, you will fundamentally hurt the entire object arena, and users will ultimately be the ones who get screwed, once again.”

TOG’s James Bell replied to Cargill by saying: “We have a relationship with the OMG, and we are already looking at ways to expand it. The OMG is very important to the ISV community, which is something that we understand. So we’re hoping that in the long term we can move our positions closer together. It’s difficult, given the circumstances. But the whole essence of open systems is about learning to live in a heterogeneous world. So we’re certainly willing to put forth a good-faith effort in moving things forward as swiftly as we possibly can.”

Bell’s statement will be put to the test sooner rather than later. Too many stakeholders in the future of open distributed computing are counting on it.