Open Network Environment (ONE) <br>takes on Microsoft behind the firewall
Great marketing is a formidable weapon. When wielded by a powerful company, it can be as decisive as excellent products. In the traditional software world, marketing of any kind has been difficult to discern, beyond the occasional zippy advertisement or trade show sideshow. From the early days of the Internet Age on, of course, marketing has been everything. Clearly, the two most prominent marketeers have been Microsoft and Netscape. And their game of one-upmanship on the World Wide Web, in the press, and in the courtroom has been fascinating to watch.
The summer months of 1996 were particularly entertaining as Netscape stage-managed a hasty announcement of its intranet strategy to disrupt a planned Microsoft event. Microsoft returned the favor by announcing its plans to license its ActiveX and DCOM technologies to an outside standards organization — three days before Netscape announced its “standards-based” Open Network Environment. It has been a great summer for comic epithets; Netscape refers to ActiveX as “CaptiveX,” and Microsoft will undoubtedly call Netscape’s product strategy not Netscape ONE, but “NONE.”
However, as this year draws to a close, reality will begin to impinge on the dream world that was the Internet. When it does, take a hard look at both company’s strategies, but start with Netscape ONE.
Netscape ONE: The promise
The premise of ONE is unquestionably valid. The Internet and most intranets are moving beyond the stage of simply providing a scalable infrastructure for information retrieval. They are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for distributed computing. As such, there is an increasing need to have not just browser-to-document or document-to-database connectivity, but complete program-to-program communications over the network. As the Internet evolves, expect to see fewer HTML documents at the end of a URL address. Expect to see programs.
Microsoft’s ActiveX and Distributed COM provide a capable mechanism for doing this now, albeit in a homogeneous Windows environment. Netscape ONE is designed to provide a new and heterogeneous vision of network-centric computing.
Netscape ONE is a fascinating exercise in seductive marketing. The basic argument is this:
IS development is shifting to a new class of network-centric applications — those that use the platform-independent technologies and open standards of the Internet to run on any hardware and software platform that supports these standards, without being tied to particular hardware or operating systems extensions.
This may well be true, although many IS shops would disagree with it on the surface. The reality of most IS shops is that they are desperate to develop applications that are easier and less expensive to create and maintain, that reuse as much of their existing infrastructure as possible (computers, databases, applications, networks, and programmers), and that execute on a small set of inexpensive hardware devices. Network-centric, open, standard, platform-independent, intranet, and yes even Java, are relevant only in this context.
In the IS world of decreasing staff and increasing backlog, is Netscape ONE’s vision better than Microsoft’s, or simply different?
ONE vs. Microsoft
The ONE environment includes a number of building blocks: Java, JavaScript, client plug-ins, server plug-ins, the Netscape foundation classes, and HTML, as well as the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), SMTP, POP3, HTTP, and other protocols. These “open standards” differentiate Netscape from “platform-anchored” Microsoft (another great epithet). Let’s assume that the quest for open standards leads to one of the benefits that IS departments really want. A key question remains: How open and standard is Netscape ONE?
At the risk of a small increase in the average IS manager’s blood pressure, let us concede Java, HTML, SMTP, POP3, and HTTP as open standards. If Netscape ONE were built around these foundation technologies (and these alone), it would be difficult to call it anything other than an open standard.
However, the second set of technologies that make up Netscape ONE — JavaScript, client plug-ins, server plug-ins, the Netscape foundation classes, and IIOP — are closer to “operating systems extensions” than standards. In Netscape ONE, it is also very easy to extend HTML, and thus start down a very slippery slope that deviates from the norm.
What is an open standard anyway? There are two principal definitions: a technology specification adopted by an independent body and widely supported, and a technology that has an 80 percent share of its market.
By this latter definition, JavaScript may be a standard. Of course, so are OLE and Windows (at least on the Intel platform). HTTP is an open standard under the first definition of the term. However, now that Microsoft has announced its intention to license ownership of the ActiveX and DCOM specifications to an outside body, they are equally transformed into open standards. IIOP is a stretch under either definition. Yes, the Object Management Group (OMG) has specified a standard Object Request Broker, but it was designed for a different purpose, and the installed base of IIOPs is close to zero.
Let’s remove the marketing facade. In practice, “open standard” means only one thing: non-Microsoft. While this definition may have currency in the software marketplace, it has little value in the corporate IS world. In the corporate world, Microsoft is the company everyone loves to hate. It is also the company that supplies much of everyone’s software infrastructure.
To be of interest to the corporate world, an open standard must do three things:
- Be heterogeneous.
- Provide an upgrade path for much or all of existing Microsoft software.
- Provide a path that is demonstrably more cost-effective than Microsoft’s.
In this world, Netscape ONE falls short on the last two of these three criteria.
Much of existing corporate software is either written for mainframes or written to conform to Windows APIs on the desktop. OLE, OCX, and ActiveX components are a sunk cost in many IS organizations, and any vision that does not provide a path for these building blocks is not standard. Similarly, while POP3 and SMTP are standards that must be supported, increasingly so is Exchange. To be not just open, but standard, Netscape ONE will need to embrace the de facto standards of the corporate world’s Microsoft infrastructure.
The Java standard
Netscape contrasts its ONE strategy against Microsoft’s, and rightly calls ActiveX a “branding campaign to reposition Microsoft’s 8-year-old OLE/OCX initiative.” However, the correct contrast to ActiveX is Java and Java Beans, not Netscape ONE. Netscape correctly points out that ActiveX is platform-dependent and Windows-centric and claims that it is proprietary and not secure. While these latter two points are open to discussion, few readers of this magazine will argue that the superior technology is not Java. However, while Java is a necessary condition for the success of Netscape ONE, the reverse is clearly not true. One can use Java within Netscape ONE, one can use it without Netscape’s interfaces, and one can use it in equally well in the Microsoft world.
There may be some bad news pending for Netscape ONE. Netscape will not define the evolution of Java. JavaSoft will. Netscape will not provide a de facto Java standard. Microsoft will. Netscape provides support for Java, Microsoft provides support for both Java and ActiveX. Java may be central to Netscape’s strategy, and may dominate its value proposition for the corporate world, but Netscape does not own the technology.
At this point in the evolution of the market, including Java in a corporate intranet strategy is almost like including HTTP. It’s a given. The ultimate question for Netscape ONE as a vision: What value does it provide to the marketplace beyond the fact that it is Java-based and that it is not Microsoft?
It is a comprehensive vision, and that is important to many corporations. It is, on the surface at least, technically sophisticated. Many of the products that make up the vision are best-of-class. Integrated well into the existing corporate infrastructure of Windows APIs, it has a chance to do very well. As an island of cool technology, it will find the going much harder — even if the cool technology is an open standard.
Conclusion
Marketing is many things. In the software world, it can lead a company with good technology to greatness. However, the best marketing is always reality-based, and the reality of the corporate world today is that it is Microsoft-centric. To win on the intranet, not just in the headlines, Netscape ONE will have to do a better of job of integrating with existing Microsoft interfaces.
In the end, saying you are an open standard and being one are two different things. For those of you who conclude that once again Microsoft will reign supreme, remember this: There are nearly 40 million Netscape browsers in the world today. And the rules that apply to Netscape also apply to Microsoft.
