The last mile

READERS OF THIS COLUMN may have noticed my constant references to the technology code-named HailStorm. Designed by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mark Lucovsky, HailStorm turned the traditional view of an application on its head. “Instead of concentrating around a specific device, application, service, or network,” the March 19, 2001 press release said, “HailStorm services are oriented around people.”

Bill Gates’ tone was effusive at the HailStorm unveiling as he sat between Lucovsky and Project Manager Bob Muglia. “We believe this innovation will take individual empowerment to a new level, create unprecedented opportunity for the industry, and trigger a renewed wave of excitement.” Fifteen months later, Muglia has been reassigned, HailStorm has been repositioned, and no one knows what Gates thinks about its prospects.

I don’t have to reiterate the attacks that descended on HailStorm — its dependencies on the proprietary Passport authentication service, its Microsoft-owned “cloud” of personal consumer data, and its apparent lack of a business model. But we’re not talking about Microsoft Bob here. Over and over that March day, Gates connected the dots between XML, HailStorm, and .Net.

Comparing HailStorm to the first wave of Microsoft Internet integration, Gates lauded the company’s XML innovations: “I can say that the company is even more focused on this than we were on that previous Internet revolution.” He called HailStorm “a new model for user-centric computing” and “a .Net building block service.” “In fact,” Gates emphasized, “it’s probably the most important .Net building block service.”

But look through the transcript of a recent Gates speech and HailStorm might as well have never existed. In a speech and Q&A at Stanford University in April, the chief software architect talks about every other element of the .Net vision — XML Web Services, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Tablet PC, even the Xbox — but not HailStorm.

The closest he comes is this rambling thought: “There’s an approach here that says that what we were doing that was focused on individual devices in the past, where your files were on a PC and your preferences were there and then when you went to another PC, it was up to you to move the information around. We have to think about these things as being more centric around people.”

Contrast this with another key building block of the Microsoft vision: broadband. Gates spent billions on a series of cable investments to coax the Baby Bells into the DSL game, and continues to seed broadband enablers such as 802.11 wireless technologies. At the Stanford Q&A, Gates discussed broadband issues at length.

“The economics of that last mile are particularly difficult,” Gates acknowledges, noting the dichotomy of the high-speed business versus the dial-up home experiences. He points to Korea’s success story, where through “fierce competition and good density and good policies broadband costs are down at about $20 a month, and so over half the households have broadband.”

Here’s the rub: “At $40, $50 a month you’re never going to get beyond, say, 15, 20 percent [of households],” Gates calculates, “and that really holds back the breakthrough applications that you’d like to see.” But wait — there’s this seemingly offhand comment: “Now, if we think in the five-to 10-year time frame, there are ways of using the airwaves and getting more information across that basically can get us around this last mile problem.”

“There is a particular issue we’re interested in right now,” Gates continues, “which is saying that if you give somebody a cable modem or DSL that you can’t restrict them from using that to create a neighborhood 802.11 Wi-Fi network. You know, some of the broadband providers are trying to put that restriction into the contract so that you can’t do that … we sort of hope that doesn’t happen because there is this way of using Wi-Fi to sort of do the equivalent of the party line and get more people sharing the connection.”

You know, Bill, that’s sort of a very good idea, taking advantage of the sharing of the Commons — and how ironic that you brought it up at Stanford, home of the nonprofit Creative Commons effort spearheaded by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. Creative Commons says it’s founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.

And let’s take that good idea one step further. How about donating the HailStorm schemas patents to the public domain so that the open-source and XML communities can bootstrap the technology today? And what better consumer platform is there to creatively license shared HailStorm apps than the Xbox?

“It’s a lot of fun to be doing a product like [the Xbox],” Gates enthuses to the Stanford crowd, “but it’s also a product that, because of the rich capabilities, will really kind of surprise people how that fits into the home network. Because it’s a full-blown computer with a disk, we’ll be able to let people have music and photos and TV Guide, and as you’re watching TV, if there’s a sports score that’s interesting to you, you have that appear exactly the way you want it, customized to your particular interests.

“There are a lot of neat things the Xbox can do beyond gaming, [but] because there isn’t that much broadband and … not that many people have Wi-Fi in their home yet, many of those things are more interesting as you get further down the road anyway.”

So how about a trade, Bill? You go the last mile on open-source HailStorm and we’ll go the last mile with you.