www.nytimes.com/2001/04/09/technology/09HAIL.html -> www.nytimes.com/2001/04/09/technology/09HAIL.html?ex=1083643200&en=7f0010d75d5be66c&ei=5070
And even if many in Silicon Valley consider him an irascible gadfly, he has a large, attentive audience. Right now he is sounding the alarm about Microsoft, which he says is trying to contort network software standards in an effort to dominate the future direction of the Internet. Winer's opinion counts, not only because of DaveNet whose readers include Microsoft's chairman, William H. Winer was one of the personal computer software industry's early programmers, who worked in the early 1980's at Personal Software, the company that introduced the first PC spreadsheet, Visicalc. And he was a pioneer in developing text outliners software that helps writers organize and rearrange information for legal briefs, reports and other documents. Winer would agree, is nothing less than a computing lingua franca a network software environment in which programs could run and be maintained on a variety of different machines, regardless of which operating system they use. Net is software programs that do not reside on any one computer but instead exist in the "cloud" of computers that make up the Internet. The move from the desktop-based computing paradigm that Microsoft has controlled to an open-network approach would be a crucial one for all computer users and software programmers. Gates has been working to transform his company through systems like the recently announced Hailstorm project, which aims to move most of a computer user's personal information from daily calendar to banking information from the desktop PC and into the network cloud, where a user could have access to it from a variety of devices and locations. To hasten this grand migration, Microsoft has been courting software developers, hoping to persuade them to write for its new operating-system-in-the-sky. Winer had maintained that the Internet would remain a level playing field and that Microsoft would not be able to seize control of the standards-setting process. Winer now argues that Microsoft is intent on locking programmers into its own software development system so that they create programs that are compatible only with the Microsoft version of the Internet. Winer's wariness is steeped in a long career as a designer working outside Microsoft but never far from its ambit. After leaving Personal Software, he founded a software outliner company called Living Videotext, which he sold to Symantec, a Silicon Valley software publisher, in 1988. He then created a new company, UserLand, to develop a set of programmer's tools for the Apple Macintosh. After a brief detour as an editor for Wired magazine's early Web site, Mr. Winer in 1995 refocused UserLand on developing programmer's tools for the Internet. His current dispute with Microsoft revolves around an arcane software standard known as XML, or extensible markup language. XML potentially represents the promised land for software developers, many of whom predict that the technology will provide the foundation for the next generation of the Web. XML, the proponents say, will make it possible for computers to talk simply and directly with other computers and for Internet information to be easily displayed on any kind of device whether a cell phone, pager, handheld computer or PC. Winer began discussing cloud-computing ideas with several Microsoft developers in 1998, and together they quickly cobbled together a standard means for communicating XML data between computers, something he called XML-RPC. Winer, developed a separate standard called SOAP, or Simple Object Access Protocol. Winer has grown alarmed in recent weeks by what he sees as Microsoft's attempt to make subtle changes in SOAP that would make it unusable by anyone except Microsoft developers. It is these fears that he has been expressing on DaveNet. Winer's admirers acknowledge that he can sometimes get too fixed on an idea. The specification is currently being tested and software developers are incorporating it into different operating systems. The ability for software in different environments to communicate to is known as interoperability, and Mr. Layman says that he is just as passionate about open standards and interoperability as Mr. Winer, even as he continues to interact with Microsoft's programmers, remains deeply suspicious of the company's motives. He argues that Microsoft has a huge temptation to pursue a strategy of locking in the developers, as the company did with the desktop PC.
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