On January 23, 2001, Microsoft settled a lawsuit brought by Sun Microsystems. In addition to paying Sun $20 million, Microsoft agreed to stop delivering its version of Java with Windows. Sun may have won the battle, but it will lose the war, because Microsoft no longer cares about Java. The company has bigger plans, and they're based on web services. Here's just one example:

Microsoft controls the desktops of the world, but it has all but conceded the market for small mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. However, rather than roll over and play dead-giving up the mobile market altogether-Microsoft has another opportunity to take the lion's share of mobile-device revenues.

As cell phones and PDAs become commodities, the value of device-resident software (such as operating systems, games, and other programs that run within the devices) will approach zero. Few people will pay more for a Java-based phone than for one that isn't. But the value of extra-cost and remotely hosted services for those devices will continue to increase. These services include mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), instant messaging (IM), location-based services (LBS) such as advertising-driven restaurant finders, and many others.

Java is supposed to be the "write once, run anywhere" technology. Web services, on the other hand, are the "write once, access from anywhere" solution. There's little inherent value in a programming language, but there's tremendous value in a universally accessible service.

To win the lucrative remotely hosted service business, Microsoft (or anyone else) needed to find a way that its services could work with all mobile devices, not just those running Java or some other software. The key was to convince all handheld device manufacturers to use one technology. It could have been Java, in which case Sun would have been able to control the technology used to link the mobile devices to remote services. But that didn't happen. Java wasn't ubiquitous.

The only way to convince all vendors to adopt a single interface technology was to truly give it away-not under some strict licensing program as Sun did with Java, but free and unencumbered. Web services is such a technology, and by convincing virtually every vendor to support it, Microsoft guaranteed it will be able to deploy services that can be reached by every device, even those based on Java. It's a brilliant strategy, and one that allowed Microsoft to leap-frog over Java.

Whatever the hidden strategies and ulterior motives, détent-the agreement by competing vendors to work together to develop full web-services interoperability-is a vector that's critical for the emergence and success of web services.

More to follow, of course. Comments and criticisms are encouraged.

Doug Kaye, 20 June 2002
doug@rds.com, www.rds.com
This report available at http://www.rds.com/essays/20020620-detente.html

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