Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a few new developer tools but otherwise played a greatest-hits set before an audience of about 10,000 information technology professionals at the TechEd conference.
Ballmer touts new developer tools
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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DEVELOPERS ! DEVELOPERS ! DEVELOPERS !
“I want to encourage you to question the conventional wisdom,” Ballmer said. “Our company has made a greater commitment to interoperability and open standards than any one gives us credit for.”
There’s a reason why that’s conventional wisdom Steve.
It’s also a demonstration of Microsoft’s commitment to XML and other open standards that allow communication between disparate computing systems, Ballmer said.
Oh please Steve, we’ve been through this one and I don’t think anyone seriously believes that Microsoft software will be interoperable with anything but Microsoft software.
Microsoft’s market-leading Office productivity software with Extensible Markup Language-based Web services. XML capability has become the focal point for Office, with Microsoft positioning the software as a broad foundation for consuming corporate data.
I don’t know why Microsoft keep peddling this one. People use Office for one reason only – to get Office work done and to produce some documents. Corporate systems simply output Office formats and people read them. Barring Access, and Excel to a certain extent, Office is not really used as a development platform. Even when they are they generally stand alone or they are merely used as content output targets; “Output this to an Excel document” – stuff of that nature.
“So Office can be a smart-client front end to XML services that live elsewhere on your network or out there on other systems,” Ballmer said.
You still have to program that ‘smartness’ in though. Office cannot do everything itself – it is generally too large and unwieldy for many systems and front-ends. That’s why it very rarely gets used for this purpose.
Ballmer also announced an update to Web Services Enhancements, Microsoft’s collection of tools for building Web services. Version 2 will focus on security enhancements, he said.
Web services…. I think everyone has web systems in their organization currently, except they just don’t call them web systems. That’s why many people look at web systems and what Microsoft and others are touting and just cannot see the point.
We’re going to California.. We’re going to Washington..we’re going to Florida.. WAAAAAARGH!!
@ David. I agree to a point with what you’re saying about the office environment being primarily used for content output, However, there are times where the content needs to be publically available and in a format easy to transfer to the web. I can see benefits here but other than that, I don’t see much use.
and yawn again… Balmer is a monkey boy, nothing more, nothing less. MS is about as interoperable and open standard as…. well…. I can’t think of anything that is as bad as MS is in those respects!