Programming Windows: Hailstorm (Premium)

While Windows XP didn’t deliver much in the way of .NET functionality, Microsoft had other plans to push forward with web services via a new initiative codenamed “HailStorm.” Yes, with that capitalization.

“HailStorm is a key milestone to deliver on the Microsoft mission to empower people through great software, any time, any place, and on any device,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said at a campus-based press conference in March 2001. “We believe this innovation will take individual empowerment to a new level, create unprecedented opportunity for the industry, and trigger a renewed wave of excitement.”

Described as “a set of enabling services,” HailStorm was essentially Microsoft connective plumbing designed for third party businesses—American Express, ClickCommerce, eBay, Expedia, and Ray Ozzie’s Groove were onboard initially—that wished to connect with individual and business customers using a centralized, common infrastructure.

Using language it would repeat in the future for other coming platforms, Microsoft said that HailStorm would “put people at the center” of their computing experiences while giving them greater control over their personal information and providing improved privacy. “Instead of concentrating around a specific device, application, service or network, ‘HailStorm’ services are oriented around people,” Microsoft explained. “They give users control of their own data and information, protecting personal information, and requiring the consent of the individual with respect to who can access the information, what they can do with it, and how long they have that permission to do so.”

Microsoft’s Passport service sat at the heart of HailStorm, Microsoft explaining, providing authentication passthrough to compatible websites and “orchestrating” applications and services so that they could act on behalf of users. Passport would also somehow let users and groups more easily collaborate and share information.

Here’s a slightly more concrete example that Microsoft provided during the initial announcement.

“For instance, a task such as booking a flight using an online travel reservation service will become much more effective. ‘HailStorm’ will help enable the travel service to automatically access the individual’s preferences and payment information. If traveling on business, a user’s affiliation with their company’s ‘HailStorm’ group identity makes it possible for the travel service to automatically show only the choices that meet the traveler’s individual preferences, and which adhere to the company’s travel policies. Once the user has chosen a flight, the travel service can use ‘HailStorm’—with the traveler’s permission—to automatically schedule the itinerary onto the specific calendaring service he or she uses. Through ‘HailStorm’, live flight itinerary information can be shared with whomever the traveler designates, and can also be accessed through a PC, someone else’s PC, a smartphone, a PDA, or any other connected device.”

In other words, Microsoft was in effect proposing to create the modern Internet, using open standards but doing so unilaterally with Microsoft servers. And there was an explicit understanding that, as HailStorm matured, customers would transition to a growing collection of paid services. That sounds anachronistic today, but it’s important to put this strategy in perspective, as Microsoft was still trying to figure out a way to make money via the Internet, and it was then distrustful of Linux and other open-source solutions. Indeed, it’s fair to say that its relationship with open source in 2001 wasn’t just immature but antagonistic, as the company’s leaders saw it as a threat to their dominant product lines.

Microsoft’s critics were quick to criticize HailStorm as yet another attempt by Microsoft to exert its dominance in personal computing to enter new markets. HailStorm, they said, was taken from the same playbook as Internet Explorer, MSN, and Windows Media Player, a way for Microsoft to unfairly leverage its Windows userbase against competitors.

AOL Time Warner and Sun Microsystems, in particular, were quite vocal about HailStorm.

Within days of the announcement, representatives from AOL met with several of the state attorneys general that were then involved in the federal government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, expressing their concern that HailStorm would create “a choke point” on Internet-based e-commerce, instant messaging, and digital music, markets that AOL was then involved with or investing in. HailStorm, AOL said, was designed “to make sure that eventually there is no reason to use anything but the versions of programs that Microsoft gives you.”

Sun was, if anything, even more critical.

“It’s kind of amazing that with this [U.S. antitrust] verdict sitting against them, they’re getting more aggressive on this path,” Sun Microsystems general counsel Mike Moore said, referring to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s ruling—then under review by an appellate court—that Microsoft was forbidden to link middleware to Windows. “These people are reprobates. They never learn.”

“Special-interest competitors are mischaracterizing the [HailStorm] vision, which is an open-access, open-design process vision, unlike AOL’s walled-garden, proprietary approach to instant messaging,” Microsoft spokesperson Vivek Varma said in response to the complaints, feigning innocence.

Heedless of the complaints, Microsoft pushed forward, trying to entice customers, partners, and developers with its vision for HailStorm. It quickly renamed the technology to the much friendlier .NET My Services and started it PR blitz to win over the doubters.

“For businesses, .NET My Services opens the door to deeper customer relationships by increasing the relevance and ease-of-use of websites and web services,” the firm explained. “Businesses benefit from the ability to send alerts (only with explicit permission from the customer) about time-sensitive, actionable events to a broad range of devices, resulting in return visits and more loyal customers.” More than 165 million people were already using .NET Passport, and over 36 million were “ready to receive .NET Alerts,” it claimed.

The end-user story was even more attractive: .NET My Services was a “digital safe box,” Microsoft claimed, that could securely store one’s personal data while maintaining their privacy. Any information stored there was only accessible to the user by default, but they could then choose to share that information with friends, family, groups, and businesses of their choosing.

For developers, .NET My Services was a technical infrastructure for the development of web-based distributed applications that would run on top of .NET. This part of the conversation was decidedly vague at first, with Microsoft admitting that there were “numerous challenges and obstacles to overcome in order to provide all of this in a robust, secure, and easy to use format.” But it promised to provide more details throughout 2001, culminating in the October 2001 Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

Initial .NET My Services offerings would include:

• .NET Profile. Name, nickname, special dates, pictures.
• .NET Contacts. Electronic relationships/address book.
• .NET Locations. Electronic and geographical location and rendezvous.
• .NET Alerts. Alert subscription, management, and routing.
• .NET Presence. Online, offline, busy, free, which device(s) to send alerts to.
• .NET Inbox. Inbox items like e-mail and voice mail, including existing mail systems.
• .NET Calendar. Time and task management.
• .NET Documents. Raw document storage.
• .NET ApplicationSettings. Application settings.
• .NET FavoriteWebSites. Favorite URLs and other Web identifiers.
• .NET Wallet. Receipts, payment instruments, coupons, and other transaction records.
• .NET Devices. Device settings, capabilities.
• .NET services. Services provided for an identity.
• .NET Lists. General-purpose lists.
• .NET Categories. A way to group lists.

It is notable that there was no way for third parties to create their own .NET My Services offerings. Instead, Microsoft was “focused on creating and launching the first set of .NET My Services.” It planned to encourage other companies to create services that extend the capabilities of .NET My Services in the future, but not create their own separate and unrelated services.

Over time, even the few companies that initially agreed to partner with Microsoft on HailStorm began having doubts about the reality of placing another firm, Microsoft, between them and their own customers. And by the time PDC 2001 rolled around, some of these partners had already started backing away from their promises to adopt the technology. Reports from the day note that the .NET My Services sessions are PDC 2001 were barely attended.

Microsoft scrambled to find more support for .NET My Services, but by early 2002, it was clear that it would need to be retooled into an offering that businesses could embrace. So it quietly set about doing just that, and it even briefly considered an enterprise offering that it tactlessly codenamed Blizzard. But what’s most interesting about this shift is that the firm’s work on an underlying, lower-level services layer called Indigo would have legs. According to reports from late 2001, Indigo would provide developers with naming, addressing, messaging, event, security, and orchestration services, and it was at least two years away. Perhaps, eWeek speculated at the time, it would be built into Longhorn, the next major version of Windows that Microsoft would ship after Windows XP.

That guess was correct. Indigo was indeed coming, but HailStorm—and Blizzard—were dead. And by early 2002, the software giant finally revealed the inevitable in a curiously roundabout way: it provided a scoop to The New York Times’s John Markoff.

“Microsoft has quietly shelved a consumer information service that was once planned as the centerpiece of the company’s foray into the market for tightly linked Web services,” Markoff wrote. “The service, originally code-named HailStorm and later renamed My Services, was to be the clearest example of the company’s ambitious .NET strategy … However, according to both industry consultants and Microsoft partners, after nine months of intense effort, the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.”

“We’re sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they’ve encountered the reality of the marketplace,” Microsoft general manager for platform strategy Charles Fitzgerald told the publication obtusely. Mr. Fitzgerald admitted that the decision to can .NET My Services was based on industry concerns about who was going to manage customer data. The issue was more of a sticking point within the industry, rather than among consumers, he said.

“Enterprise customers were telling Microsoft, ‘We like this idea, but we don’t want to be part of this huge public database’,” Directions on Microsoft analysts Matt Rosoff added.

Microsoft’s inability to push .NET My Services forward was a disaster. But it was also just a symptom of bigger problems for the software giant. By early 2002, less than two years after its bombastic introduction to .NET, Microsoft had little to show for its latest “bet the company” initiative.

The firm shipped the initial version of the .NET Framework in February 2002 alongside Visual Studio .NET, the latter of which was notable for two reasons: Microsoft was now separating the “.NET” part of its product names with a space, and Visual Studio would go on to be one of the only Microsoft products to actually use this branding. (MapPoint .NET is another rare example, while the oft-touted Windows .NET Server would never ship with .NET branding.)

As notable, perhaps, it had hired “COM and SOAP pioneer” Don Box a month earlier. Box, like Indigo, would go on to play a major role in the Longhorn festivities of 2003.

In March, Microsoft released the “shared source” implementations of its .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and C# implementations as ECMA standards, which consisted of approximately one million lines of source code. To be clear, shared source was not open source, and it only allowed outsiders to view the source code and submit feedback. This release was described as a “bold experiment” by industry pioneer Tim O’Reilly in what can only be called faint praise, but it didn’t garner much support.

By mid-2002, however, it was clear that .NET momentum was stalling, despite Microsoft having shipped one million units of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework since their release earlier in the year. And so the software giant announced a “phase two” for .NET that would include new versions of Visual Studio that were codenamed “Everett” and “Yukon” and would “take advantage of” Windows .NET Server, the successor to Windows 2000 Server, and SQL Server “Yukon,” respectively. Forthcoming Passport technology would “enable users to have more fine-grained control over how their personal information is managed online.” And MSN 8, a new integrated Internet access service would deliver the user interface many had previously confused for Blackcomb and integrated access to the Passport and .NET Alerts building-block services.

But the mood was a bit down: two years after the .NET announcement and Microsoft was still just making promises.

“In some respects, we are further ahead, and in some respects [we have] not [moved] as fast [as we hoped]” with .NET, Bill Gates admitted. “Maybe the .Net Enterprise servers were prematurely called .NET. The first generation of .NET products was [just] putting a layer on top of existing functionality … There were elements of [.NET My Services] that in some ways were premature [too]. We feel good about the [.NET My Services] vision, but we made a couple of missteps on this.” Microsoft, he said, would do “a bit of a reset” on .NET over the coming year.

What Gates was hinting at is that Microsoft initially overused the .NET branding, confusing what .NET was and what it meant to have .NET inside of its other products. As you may recall, the firm initially promised that virtually everything it released in the future, including coming Windows, Office, and MSN versions, would bear by the .NET game. But none of those products would go on to use .NET branding, and, more importantly, none would really include all that much .NET technology either.

“We created a parade that suddenly everybody [in Microsoft] wanted to be in,” the suddenly quotable Charles Fitzgerald added a month later in a conversation with ZDNet. “Our biggest problem was policing the use of .NET. Things like the .NET Enterprise Servers. That’s a great example of where the confusion came from because it looked like we were slapping .NET on a bunch of random products.”

Moving forward, Microsoft would offer a clearer .NET vision and it would describe .NET as “software to connect information, people, systems, and devices.” But .NET would never really resonate with Microsoft’s customers. Instead, it would attract developers looking for a more sophisticated environment than Microsoft had offered in the past, one that would help them extend their experience beyond the PC to new generations of devices, servers, and online services. This smaller focus would become so problematic and so obvious to Microsoft that it would try to kill off the .NET brand the following year when it introduced its Longhorn developer story.

And that is a fascinating story. But we have many other events to cover first.