Nick Drake has a posthumous album, titled Made to Love Magic. The title song is about, as the name implies, coming to accept and even love magic, catalyzed by certain, difficult circumstances. Lately, Bill Gates has been singing his own song about magic, only he is taking a nearly opposite tack and proclaiming that the magic of software will make life easier for IT folk. Personally, whenever I hear the word magic relating in any way to technology, I get a bit skeptical, not to mention just plain scared. So when Gates evangelized Microsoft’s DSI initiative by saying that the magic of software will eliminate the complexity of managing, well, complex distributed systems, my eyebrow nearly leapt up to my hairline. DSI is an acronym for Dynamic Systems Initiative. (For a poignant view of IT acronyms see Paul Krill’s opinion.) Gates described DSI as Microsoft’s phraseology for shifting from thinking about individual systems and manual activities to the streamlined creation and maintenance of distributed systems which, of course, relies on the automation of tasks and capabilities such as having apps and hardware keep management software apprised of their status. Chairman Bill went on to say that DSI is a long-term vision that will require broad industry cooperation. Read: Microsoft’s partners and competitors will have to agree to support DSI for the initiative to reach a level of potential worthwhile of customers’ time and financial investment. That reminds me more than just a little of the marketing-speak around Web services, back in 2000, when Microsoft first gave the notion a name. And every day since then has been a struggle — some legitimate technical battles; others mere bickering between rivals — just to get all the different vendors on board for Web services standards. That is not to say that Web services have not caught on, just that it has been somewhat bumpy, and the road ahead has more than one standard-related obstacle within. Bill Gates may be the closest thing the IT industry has to a Harry Houdini, but the real rabbit to pull out of his hat will be the alignment of different vendors to actually agree to DSI in a capacity more technical than conceptual, and to avoid the drawn-out process that invariably occurs when multiple vendors try to mold a standard, any standard, to their own proprietary interests. Technology Industry