Mood:
specialNow Playing: New Skin for Old Faces - Geriatric farm grows hair on eggs (some disgusting nudity)
Topic: Microsoft and VCSY
Or: Why I would not talk if I were Wade.
I began writing about VCSY a long time ago. I began writing before they went quiet.
Here's me back when I had more hair:
http://clearstation.etrade.com/cgi-bin/bbs?post_id=1114211&usernm=Portuno_Diamo
What would you do in VCSY's case when you found out some large companies are determined to take the technology you've secured?
Warren Buffet doesn't say a word to the world about anything except to file the required securities reports about the status of the company and he's a genius, right?
Wade does it and he's called a fraud. That's some even-handed justice you dispense there, Sheriff.
Everything I've written has been an attempt to make sense out of a blanket of bits and pieces of information available publicly across the internet. Back in the early part of this decade, the internet was wild West and you would be amazed how much extraneous information was left laying around back then. Today, folks are more careful and their webmasters more wise.
I've done nothing without the help of a couple dozen people volunteered somehow dedicated to studying or at least becoming informed about the company of their investment. They found and continue to find a great deal of interesting material although all the major software industry moves in technology are building out today what VCSY intellectual property predicted back in 2000 when I first began writing.
They found material. They made that material known. I wrote about what I saw. I draw from being in the business of distributed process computing in the manufacturing industry for a long time. It's what your desktop would be doing if it were making things for a living instead of justifying its existence remembering and regurgitating on your desk.
But, to get to that kind of point across the internet, certain things will need to be in place.
The "Semantic Web" infrastructure first begins with the tagging phase, meaning RDF ( Resource Description Framework) http://www.w3.org/RDF/ microformats and all sorts of schemes will begin turning exising webpages into data resource, or, more accurately, metadata resources. Today, webpages are data resources for humans. They are things you look at, listen to and make all kinds of funny faces in front of.
For over a decade the Web has been dumb. It can only present and crudely interact and only in the realm of publication of content.
What has to happen before the web can be adequately ready to begin publication of function is where folks like Yahoo are stepping in and up. They understand the promise of the future is not a threat to them. Microsoft, for some reason, views the next paradigm of web development as a threat.
Why? Because they aren't ready, and they had since 2000 and billions of dollars to GET ready. And, all they produced was SOAP; an XML based RPC (Remote Procedure Call) transactional concept which works in chains of remote stations intercommunicating with a central server. SOAP allows intercommunicating with a lot of servers. The stink is that you have to be intercommunicating with servers in the first place to get something done in SOAP.
In the VCSY version, the location of the user (client) is the kingpin, and remote servers are real-time libraries, vaults, yellow pages and dictionaries... along with a lot of different additional facilities, as you need or desire.
But, you don't depend on them for your procedural decisions and responses. Too much lag. Too much latency. Too much remote management and clumbsy exchange.
SOAP relies on sending a request for a procedure to be run, and must wait for the response.
An Agent does what it does locally and can process offline and continue the determinism when online happens again.
Microsoft is trying to make this kind of processing happen on their side with Smart Client. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_client
We will have an opportunity to be able to compare the two approaches in the future as both VCSY and Microsoft come out from behind their screens.
Ray Ozzie is finally out and talking if you believe this Google of his name in the news: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=%22Ray+Ozzie%22
Sounds like a whole lot of air. Very funny nothing is ever said libelously about Microsoft's stealth posture... while reviling Wade as stupid and suspicious.
If you're smart (and I do know some of you are; not many, but several score) you'll study the 7076521 patent and read what's said about Microsoft Smart Client by others.
A Microsoft product called SilkRoute was used as a challenge to the 7076521 patent but failed. Smart Client appears to be a result of Microsoft attempting to do something like the VCSY agent, having found SilkRoute was like AJAX (if XMLhttpRequest is in SilkRoute, then Silkroute worked like AJAX) and had a unidirectional form and not dependable on commercial application footing, but wonderful for doing precisely what Microsoft always intended to do: Present the desktop on the user's browser, but, always keep the processing power as close to Microsoft property as possible.
AJAX is wonderful for a thin client mentality. But, the fit client or fat client have no real place for an AJAX based role in deterministic transactions.
So SilkRoute designers never managed to work on the problems one finds when one wants to relocate the center of processing from the server to the local machine and in as many remote places as the processing in the local machine need. For that reason, MLE is more refined and more a product of network transactional practices than client perimeter defense.
The inventor of 7076521 is the guy who built an agent system for SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). SNMP is the standard network framework for communications hardware systems.
What he learned in SNMP agent work, he applied to http using XML and built MLE, a native XML processing agent... back in 2000.
Fast forward 8 years and, now, we see a group of developers agonizing about how to build an open-source version of an agent.
http://openmanagement.org/message/1156
In effect, copying in some crude form using SNMP to affect an internet agent.
Why now, guys? Did it suddenly (this year... finally) dawn on the open-source movement; the value of the agent? Well, apparently, it hasn't been all that obvious to many others. Microsoft sure took their sweet time.
Too broad? These developers are going ahead and building their version by morphing the SNMP agent framework. So, apparently one can code around patent 7076521 by using prior art and doing your own feature development.
I wonder how many nooks, crannies and cull-de-sacks they will bumble into along the evolutionary trail?
I wonder how far evolved MLE is by now? Eight years later.
All this time Microsoft has been working on only half the problem. Now, they've begun to address the second and third half of the problem.
I wonder how long it will take them to perfect their effort?
I wonder when they will step over the line and Wade hits them with a lawsuit for 521.
Meanwhile Yahoo is filling out the expression of their data in RDF preparing for building processing machines between their data repositories and metadata labs with Google and others... except... at this point; more than likely not Microsoft.
So, that's a basic assessment for tonight. Just thought it was time to tell you why I would not talk if I were Wade.
It's better to finish the trial fight and then turn to the industry and ask them to explain to the nice people out there in all those companies, partners, clients and industries why it took eight years to reach this point in web development. Or, more pointedly; Why did it take this long for this kind of thing to become public?
I think Wade intends to stick a fork in Microsoft's liver. I would. I would make sure they could do nothing but watch from the sidelines. And I wouldn't say a word until the whole sorry episode is over.
Why? Because the world deserves a good surprise. That's why.
Sleep Tight.
Love,
Portuno Rastamafoo Fuzzies
