What's Bill been up to recently? Well he completely missed the Internet boat, thinking he'd be sailing home on the proprietary MSN. Well several torturous U-turns later and Visual Studio 97 is about to be launched from Microsoft's software foundry in the depths of their Redmond campus.

What's Visual Studio 97 all about then? Its a programmer's dream combining Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, Visual Interdev (FrontPage97 on steroids) and the Developer Network Library. All professional editions, all with the same IDE interface making them powerful and easy to master. With this raft of applications you can make the most complex Internet applications, from basic web-based database front-ends all the way up to the snappily named Active Server Pages, all part of their nifty Active Platform concept.

The whole thing revolves around ActiveX (formerly OLE) which work best with, hmmm Windows. Instead of JavaScript, use VBScript, which currently only works in...Windows. Oh sure, use their Java development environment J++ but its enhanced for Windows, defeating the point of Java in the first place. How many developers can deny the beauty of such an integrated suite or the size of the Windows market?

We risk having proprietary standards furtively taking control of the inherently open Internet. Even though Microsoft had handed control of several standards over to the Open Group, they are still Windows optimised standards. Who can compete against such market share or such a complete solution from Windows NT, BackOffice to Visual Studio 97 everything is catered for by one company. IBM's popular Visual Age development environment might just compete against Microsoft as well as Borland's Delphi environment which has recently been adapted for C++ but neither offer so many languages along with the other features.

Fortunately over the last few weeks several major security issues have been raised about ActiveX and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator is deemed more secure compared to Explorer and Java (and Java Beans) safer than ActiveX. Maybe the grand anti-Microsoft alliance of Sun, Oracle, IBM, Netscape and others might pull it off, but only if they too can be creative enough with marketing and packaging to compete on a level with the masters in Seattle.

Otherwise we risk one company controlling to much of our newest and greatest communications medium. Its a masterstroke from Microsoft and a serious warning to other companies that Microsoft want to compete and they are going to play hardball.

 

By Jeep

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