War of Web services: Visual Studio sees the most expansive launch

Elinor Mills Abreu

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates rolled out the company's

most-expansive launch of software development tools on Wednesday, a bid to catapult

Microsoft's Web-based applications platform .NET ahead of the Java programs favored by

many businesses.

"About three years ago we bet the company on this Web services paradigm,"

Gates told an auditorium full of Windows developers waiting to get a look at the

application developer tools, known as Visual Studio.

The company has spent about $2 billion on research and development on Visual Studio

over the last three years, a spokesman said.

According to Gates, interest has been phenomenal, with more than 6,000 customers and

3.5 million developers using the tools under an early release beta test program. The tools

have reached more programmers than any of the earlier launches for Windows software, a

company spokesman said.

Gates showed off applications created using Visual Studio by L'Oreal and Merrill Lynch,

but the demonstration that drew the biggest applause was done by five students at Monte

Verde High School in Danville, California.

The students created a program that allows students, teachers and parents to check up

on student grades via PC, personal digital assistant or cell phone.

However, the corporate market is the one that Microsoft covets, and some analysts say

breaking into enterprises will be challenging given that many have already been using the

Java development language for years.

Cracking the corporate market

Microsoft is pitted directly against Web services efforts led by Sun Microsystems Inc.,

International Business Machines Corp. and others, whose programming language of choice is

Java.

While Microsoft will be able to convince small and medium-size companies -- which have

long been Microsoft platform supporters -- to move to .NET, "for larger enterprises

that run data centers on Unix and have largely already begun their move to Java ... this

will be a difficult sell," said Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs in a research note.

Nick Patience, of technology analysis firm The451, estimates that as much as 75 per

cent of the Web services development so far has been done on Java, which works with a

variety of operating systems, including Unix.

Microsoft is effectively luring Java developers to .NET with a tool called Java User

Migration Path (JUMP), Eric Rudder, senior vice president of developer and platform

evangelism, said in an interview. JUMP automatically converts existing Java-language

source code into code used in Windows.

But, that solves only part of the problem, said Patience. "If you write an

application with Microsoft technology it won't run on Java application servers," he

said.

"Most enterprises are making the decision whether to be Java or .NET," said

Michael Smith, principal technologist at BEA Systems Inc., which sells application

infrastructure software. Because most corporations use mainframes and Unix, they've

already chosen Java, Smith added. "They want heterogeneous platforms, not to be tied

to Windows."

Microsoft executives say they aren't worried. The .NET platform will appeal to more

developers because it allows them to use any of 20 or so programming languages, Gates

said.

"We expect 2 million developers to adopt (.Net) within oneyear," Tom Button,

vice president of developer marketing and enterprise tools at Microsoft, predicted during

a question and answer session following Gates' keynote.