A school friend of mine, Tom Welsh, recently drew my attention to the great ActiveX standards kerfuffle (and provided most of the factual material below). In December 1995 Bill Gates was becoming alarmed that the new-fangled web browsers from Netscape were cutting Microsoft off from its loyal desktop users. To help defend against the threat, there was a big announcement about the exciting new ActiveX technology. By April 1996 over a hundred software vendors had announced they would be supporting the new technology.
On Friday 26 July, MS announced it would turn the new technology over to a standards body to be chosen at meeting of vendors and users in New York on 20 August. The day was curiously chosen to fall right in the middle of Object World West, when everyone connected with “object” technologies was sure to be unavailable. On Monday (the next working day) Netscape announced its Open Network Environment, which is based on CORBA, a competing and open object technology. Surely, the MS announcement had not been rushed out to pre-empt Netscape?
Sure enough, the 20 August meeting got postponed until 1 October. When it happened, delegates were given a choice between a new ad hoc body and the “Open Group” (a consortium formed by X/Open and Open Software Foundation). Unsurprisingly, they voted 63-19 in favour of Open Group.
It soon became apparent that the outcome was not exactly as billed. Open Group allowed MS to organise the new “Active Group” activity and MS set up a steering group of friends to control it. It then undertook to grant the Open Group a non-exclusive licence for the MS ActiveX “core technology”.
Ok, hands up those who grasp what is going on (without sneaking any looks further down the page)! I guarantee that whilst many techies may have put their hands up, no politicos or general readers will have the foggiest idea. That neatly encapsulates why MS still has a monopoly.
An excellent general education, even a degree in Economics or Law, simply does not help much when it comes to the political issues raised by software. That is why the world not only allows MS to levy its own private tax of several tens of billion dollars and make Bill Gates one of the world’s richest men, but actually loves MS and Bill for doing it. Indeed, Bill is now widely praised for the work of the MS Foundation.
Bizarre. If you would like to hand me the odd hundred billion in return for holding back technological progress over the next few decades, I would be happy to give some of it back in philanthropic activities … provided you praised me enough, of course …
Anyway, the answer. Well, the clue is the non-exclusive licence. It turned out that MS had no interest in making ActiveX an open standard. What it wanted was a free port to other platforms! An amazing wheeze really. Not only had MS no intention whatever of losing control of the technology, but it even hoped to rope in a load of mugs to carry out free work!
Unfortunately for MS the kicker did not really work, presumably because the mugs spotted what was going on, and the Active Group never actually did anything. Its website remained around, increasingly ghostlike - but it now seems to be up for sale possibly by new owners.
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I think “April 2006″ is meant to be “April 1996″.
Also, I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks these kinds of games are way beyond hardball business behaviour and are the IT equivalent of clear-cutting rainforest or dumping toxic waste i.e. almost as immoral as they are profitable.
Many thanks for the correction (now fixed).
I also tend to think some business behaviour is immoral. But I am more concerned to try to cajole the regulatory authorities into action … There are ample powers to force MS to reform. But getting politicians to use them is another matter. The big problem is that most voters don’t realize they are being hurt.
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