Save the whalestorm

JIM ALLCHIN IS a careful man. In interviews, he hews closely to the topic at hand. That’s not to say that his responses are tightly scripted, but clearly there are talking points — a skeleton of issues that form the boundaries of the discussion.

The last time I talked with him, in October 2001, the occasion was the rollout of Windows XP. Although he was suffering from a cold, Allchin seemed elated at having achieved his long-sought goal of unifying the consumer and enterprise versions of Windows in a single code base.

Back then, I was eager to get Allchin on the record about the relationship between the operating system (XP), the next-generation unified storage system (code-named Yukon), and the XML-based .Net My Services (aka Hailstorm) technologies. “If I lay out my old dreams, we certainly accomplished one today,” Allchin said, “but I had another dream and it was about a system called OFS, you might remember that from the Cairo [Windows NT Server] days.”

“I have not given up on that, and neither has Bill [Gates],” he confirmed. “And we will ship a system with a richer storage.” But Allchin was noncommittal about blending the Hailstorm XML shredding technologies with Yukon. “We actually have several different pieces of shredding technology. … Our vision is one where you don’t have to use XML coming into the storage system if you don’t want to; you could use a different set of APIs coming in.”

“I want to be able to do XML, but I want to be able to do other things too,” Allchin insisted. “And the reason for that is I want to be able to have this rich storage system, I want to be able to pass handles off just like we do to files now through regular apps.” Ah, yes, there’s that favorite Microsoft word — rich.

Contrast this view with that of Hailstorm architect Mark Lukovsky. A week before the conversation with Allchin, Microsoft had released the My Services SDK (software development kit) at the company’s Professional Developer Conference. Later, Lucovsky told me that Hailstorm was a gamble to use XML not just as a message transfer protocol for data, but as a gateway to a programmable Web.

I asked Lucovsky whether Hailstorm technology would alter the way Microsoft products are architected. “I’ve got an old application, Exchange, that has some DAV (Distributed Authoring and Version) and MAPI (Messaging API) interfaces. The obvious next generation is to say, ‘Let’s put the modern XML head on top of the corporate e-mail system,’ ” Lucovsky said.

Back then, Lucovsky seemed confident of support at the highest levels. “Bob Muglia was my program manager on Windows NT. Now he’s group VP. He knows that I’m really right on deep technical issues, and he trusts my judgment.” Lucovsky emphasized.

Bob Muglia’s name came up again just a few weeks ago in Washington. The occasion was Jim Allchin’s testimony in the continuing State of New York et al. vs. Microsoft Corporation trial. State’s attorney Kevin Hodges asked Allchin about Muglia’s role in something called the .Net Services Group, and a paragraph in a document from October 2000 that stated: “.Net Services will also include unpublished proprietary protocols.”

Allchin: “Well, it’s a little hard to know what Bob might have been thinking. We disbanded this organization. I don’t know whether the word Hailstorm ever came up in this trial or hearing, but he was working on some aspects of that, and that has been pretty much completely dissolved, so I don’t know which — what he was talking about here.”

Later in the deposition, Hodges asks Allchin: “Is there a relationship between Hailstorm and .Net Services?”

Allchin: “Hailstorm encompassed a set of services that Microsoft was — some technology that we were going to build on top of the XML Web services and be able to offer those services to small businesses or enterprises or consumers.”

Hodges: “What’s the relationship between .Net Services and .Net My Services?”

Allchin: “Very, very unclear. That’s some of the reason that this didn’t proceed ahead. Very, very unclear.”

Hodges: “Is there a relationship?”

Allchin: “Well, I don’t think I can answer that, because this was Bob’s view. He and I disagreed on some of these things.”

In the next day’s testimony, Allchin suggests where Hailstorm in fact is going forward: “We’re going to be able to provide this level of technology within a corporation so they’ll buy products from us that may have this technology in it.”

And then there’s this tantalizing hint of things to come: “An example would be that within Microsoft, if I wanted to talk with someone through a video, say, on the PC, or an instant message conversation I wouldn’t have to go to the Internet. And, admitted, I’m working on some new technology that lets me do this. But we’re going to end up being able to offer that technology to businesses so that they don’t have to go out to the Internet. Certainly not to a Microsoft site. Frankly, not to anybody’s site if they don’t want to.”

And remember Lucovsky’s words: “We’re not going to change everything at once, but we are changing.” The last time I saw Mark, at the InfoWorld NextGen Web Services conference in January, I jokingly asked him if he still had a job. “I think so,” he said. “Why, what have you heard?”