Microsoft fears hype and IBM... but not Sun

Microsoft has admitted its biggest worry over the roll out of its flagship .Net strategy is the potential backlash from angry customers once they realise today's web services are mainly hype.

And according to Charles Fitzgerald, global director of strategy for the .Net platform at Microsoft, his firm is also much more worried about IBM's Websphere than the widely perceived battle between .Net and Java.

In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Fitzgerald said: "Our biggest fear is that everyone gets bored of web services before they are delivered. We are hearing a lot of hype about this at the moment and you have to ask if people are going to get disenchanted if things don't happen immediately."

He claimed the behaviour of other vendors was making this outcome more likely, with many companies paying lip service to web services, without real technology to back it up.

He said: "There is a lot of bandwagon jumping going on, from people that are in no way grounded in this.

"Our concern is that those who are patently just along for the ride are setting some unreasonable expectations."

He likened the situation to the dot-com boom, where excessive hype contributed to excessive negative feeling when the bubble burst.

Gartner Group predicts the web services market will fall into disillusionment in 2004 as it will struggle to prove its immediate value.

Fitzgerald was scathing about competitors' attempts to provide alternatives to Microsoft's vision of web services. In particular he singled out Sun for criticism, saying the server giant still hadn't learnt how to become a software company.

He said: "As far as Sun ONE programme goes it's really a case of new name, same old rubbish. Sun has some real challenges - it's the last of the vertically integrated computer firms to survive, in a world where this type of company just can't exist - and it's managed to mishandle Java to the extent that IBM and BEA have run away with all the revenue.

"Just a year ago it was saying web services was all smoke and mirrors and hype. It's utterly schizophrenic."

In addition, he said, the noise being made by Sun was hiding the fact that the real competition in the vendor space was not between Microsoft and Java, but between Microsoft and IBM's Websphere platform.