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Subject: [Infoworld] Ballmer describes what a Chief Software Architect does
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 21:51:44 -0700 (PDT)

Rohit was wondering what Microsoft's definition of a Chief Software
Architect is (and, consequently, what Microsoft thinks is a roadmap).
Here you go, from Mr. Ballmer to Mr. Gillmor to Mr. FoRK...
Architecture is war; love 'em or hate 'em, at least Microsoft
understands that: as Chief SA, BillG oversees all product strategy.

"There are two things a road map can be. One is just a piece of paper
that tells what everyone is doing and records a bunch of bottom-up
plans. Or it can be something where we impose more broadly our vision
from the top. We are not going to try to get everything shared. ...
That's a path for getting everything stopped up. But at the same time we
are trying to take the top four or five things we are trying to do in
the Longhorn wave, Yukon wave, or the .Net wave and really have enough
time to have some cross-cutting discussions about how we make that happen."

"Bill [Gates] is dedicated full-time to being chief software
architect. He also happens to be chairman of the company, but he spends
most of his time being chief software architect. We have a body now that
meets every month -- the SLTT [Senior Leadership Technical Team],
basically the top people involved in the product-creating strategy --
and we present and discuss the issues. Bill is driving a process for
each of these waves. For instance, [he will ask] what are the
cross-cutting scenarios that I want, and then [he will] get all the
right product groups together and bring these things in front of the SLTT."

"People talk about what it takes to be a good manager, and people talk
about being a good coach and getting people to like you. In a large
organization those things are important, but at a certain level, ... the
most important thing you can do for your people to make them better is
to give them a framework where they can work in harmony with the other
people in the company. And from Bill's perspective, [this framework] is
the technical road map and the SLTT process; it is the scenarios. From
my perspective, it is the P&L [profit and loss] structure and the
multiple businesses because, given how we work, giving people a
framework that gets them to make the whole bigger than the sum of the
parts will mean we have better offerings."



http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/07/22/020722plballmer.xml

Ballmer in charge 
July 18, 2002 1:01 pm PT

NO ONE KNOWS better than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that, as the .Net
platform evolves, the success of Microsoft depends on how well the
company coordinates its tool, server, and client strategies and how well
it communicates that vision. In an interview with InfoWorld Test Center
Director Steve Gillmor and InfoWorld Editor at Large Ed Scannell at
Microsoft Fusion 2002, Ballmer discussed the progress of .Net, changes
in the company's approach to product development, and Microsoft's
efforts to simplify product licensing and inspire trust in customers and
partners.

> Last time we talked was two years ago, at the beginning of the .Net
> era. So where are we now in the .Net evolution?

Let me start by talking about where I think we are in the XML revolution
first, and then [I will] talk about where we are with .Net. I believe
that the IT industry collectively decided over the last three or four
years that the world was going to be replatformed with XML as the key
foundation. It's not like anyone ever got together to decide this, but
it's like magnetic north, where it's been clearly indicated that
everyone is rallying around the concept. But I think the degree to which
[XML] is pervasive might still be underestimated. A lot of partners,
even at this conference, see it as b-to-b for big companies. But it is
really about the way software in general is designed. It is all about
the way security should work. Management -- everything is changed.

So to answer your direct question, two years ago I might have said the
jury is still out about whether [XML] was going to happen. We were
questioning if it was going to be a legitimate competitor to Java. But
now the world has decided to embrace [XML] as the basis for the next
generation of technology. And there are a lot of benefits that come with
it. Could it have been something other than XML? Sure it could have. It
wasn't the specific technical implementation; it is merely the fact that
it comes out of Internet standards. It has deeper semantic abilities. It
is all about interoperability and connection.

So in that context, where are we with .Net? I'll say a couple
things. No. 1, I would say we have some momentum in the market. We have
customers using the .Net product line, like Merrill [Lynch], Credit
Suisse, Marks & Spencer, CitiBank, and a variety of others. People who
are doing some things for real. I feel like the degree we are out front
is in some ways smaller and in some ways larger.

> How so?

Smaller in the sense that everyone is talking the XML talk, even Sun;
bigger in the execution sense: We've delivered. We delivered the first
batch of products that really were built XML to the core -- Visual
Studio .Net and BizTalk Server -- and we are getting traction. So I feel
good about where our execution is relative to everyone else. That is not
to say that other people aren't doing some reasonable bolt-on XML
support for the stuff they have.

> You have some heavy lifting to do to convince your customers and
> partners to follow along. What do you have to do to set the standard
> for adoption and upgrading to this next generation?

We have to present the picture that we are behaving consistently within
the framework of focusing on customer issues and customer satisfaction
and trustworthy computing, which we have articulated. Now there are some
things I would have done differently, in 20-20 hindsight. I would have
increased the focus on not just security but deployment, because a lot
of the security problems are actually deployment problems. We have the
fix, but sometimes we can't get the tools in their hands to deploy those
fixes fast enough. Licensing -- I know I would have given more time, and
there are better ways to plan around the kinds of changes we made. We
are still going to have to get smart about the full ramifications.

> Do you expect any changes to be made between now and July 31 to
> Licensing 6.0? There is a lot of push-back on this.

No, there is nothing that will happen between now and July 31. And we
will continue to learn over time what we need to do to earn our
customers' trust and earn their business. I think many of the people who
are pushing back really don't even know the new terms.

> Isn't that your fault for not educating them?

Yes, it is our fault. But you meet with plenty of customers whose
companies already have licenses, and they are saying, 'I think there's a
problem.' I don't deny there are some problems. I am sure there are some
issues we will have to work on over time.

After July 31 we are going to see what the real issues are. I was
talking to a customer at the show who was saying he thought there would
be a problem, and I told him that we just completed a deal with his
company and that he is now universally licensed and that total costs to
his company are now lower than they were before. And he said, 'Oh really?'

So we'll go through July 31. We have a lot of customers who have signed
licenses, and I am sure we are going to find some issues. My bigger
concerns today are probably not in the larger accounts, but there may be
some issues we need to address among the smaller-size companies, and we will.

> How does the .Net initiative change the way in-house client and server
> developers work together? 

What we are trying to do for the health of .Net and the health of the
company and the sanity of the people who work there and the quality of
the products we produce is to have a more orchestrated, žber-road map
of where we are going.

Now there are two things a road map can be. One is just a piece of paper
that tells what everyone is doing and records a bunch of bottom-up
plans. Or it can be something where we impose more broadly our vision
from the top. We are not going to try to get everything shared. ...
That's a path for getting everything stopped up. But at the same time we
are trying to take the top four or five things we are trying to do in
the Longhorn wave, Yukon wave, or the .Net wave and really have enough
time to have some cross-cutting discussions about how we make that happen.

Bill [Gates] is dedicated full-time to being chief software
architect. He also happens to be chairman of the company, but he spends
most of his time being chief software architect. We have a body now that
meets every month -- the SLTT [Senior Leadership Technical Team],
basically the top people involved in the product-creating strategy --
and we present and discuss the issues. Bill is driving a process for
each of these waves. For instance, [he will ask] what are the
cross-cutting scenarios that I want, and then [he will] get all the
right product groups together and bring these things in front of the SLTT.

People talk about what it takes to be a good manager, and people talk
about being a good coach and getting people to like you. In a large
organization those things are important, but at a certain level, ... the
most important thing you can do for your people to make them better is
to give them a framework where they can work in harmony with the other
people in the company. And from Bill's perspective, [this framework] is
the technical road map and the SLTT process; it is the scenarios. From
my perspective, it is the P&L [profit and loss] structure and the
multiple businesses because, given how we work, giving people a
framework that gets them to make the whole bigger than the sum of the
parts will mean we have better offerings.

> It seems the scenarios construct is really working for you. Is this an
> evolution of the solutions approach? 

I would say it is a pretty direct extrapolation from the solutions
stuff, only I think we are just getting a little more experience. I
think we use the word scenarios more often and solutions less, because
solution sounds more like a fixed thing. At the end of the day, most of
the things we do are customizable and programmable, and so people make
them into the solution they want. But they are still scenarios. What
will software deployment look like? Well, that is a scenario because it
involves Windows, Office, and other applications.

We are working hard to make sure the whole is bigger than the sum of the
parts. That's not to say people are always comfortable with this. I
can't even say we will do it perfectly. All we have to do is do it a lot
better than we had been doing it. I think that would be a big step
forward for the customers.

> Will this approach cut down on some of the technology civil wars
> Microsoft has had in the past involving who is going to gain control of
> a project? This seems to be a very democratic approach to development.

I would not use the word democracy to describe it. People have to come
together and ultimately make some decisions. This is not a voting
process here, the agenda of what we think is important. We get a lot of
input. [But] once it is decided, people don't get to vote with their feet.

We try to make a quantum leap here in terms of our ability to improve
pulling together all the pieces. Our customers want us to do
that. Simplifying concepts by unifying them. The customers don't say
they want us to do that, but when we do do that, they go, 'Ahhh, I get
it. That makes sense.'

I don't want to go to six more meetings where people say, 'Is your
workflow strategy BizTalk?' ... Or 'What's your Office workflow
strategy?' Or 'Why is synchronization in some ways better for e-mail and
Outlook than it is for file folders and Web pages?'

To get that sort of synchronization sometimes -- to get that high-level
road map to work -- you have to build something we don't have today. So
we have been talking about unifying storage. And so the best way to get
all this stuff to work is to get them all to work just one way. Then you
just keep tuning one set of parameters instead of having a thousand
flowers blooming.

> In your Fusion keynote today, you talked about who your competitors
> are, and it was the usual suspects. But one you didn't mention is
> yourself. You are competing against the last generation of your technology.

Always. Given that our stuff doesn't wear out or break down -- you can
question whether it breaks or not [Ballmer grins] -- but it doesn't
break down like machinery does. To get anyone to do something new, we
have to have something interesting and innovative.

People think, OK, should we just do more upgrades or try to sell more
new product? We decided that users like us to do a level of systems
integration so they don't have to get involved in that. So take
Sharepoint Team Services, which we put in Office. We could have sold
Team Services as a separate product, and we could have introduced a new
SKU [stock keeping unit]. We could have decided if it should work down
level with the old Office or just the new version of Office, and we
could do that with real-time communications. But we tend to like to put
things together, integrate them, and then release batches?1202?-- which
are then 'upgrades' -- as a form of introducing our new innovation. But
no matter how you do it, because our stuff does not wear out, we have to
convince people that some idea we have is better or more powerful than
the older idea we had.

And there are two aspects of doing that. One aspect is, on a given
product or upgrade release, does that make sense? Or do we convince you
that over an nyear period of time we will have enough innovation that
you will want to be licensed for that innovation. And this is part of
this whole licensing discussion we are having.

We moved to the new licensing for two reasons, I would say. No. 1, we
wanted to simplify our licensing. When we look back a year from now, I
guarantee you that where we are now is simpler than where we
were. Nothing is simpler during a transition because they are learning
the new and are more familiar with the old, but I think people will
eventually realize this is simpler. Our licensing got pretty complicated
over the years, and some people came to not understand it all.

The other issue is [the timing of delivering] our innovation. I don't
want to have a lot of rough questions [from customers]. So when we do
have new ideas, it's like, OK, should we put it in this upgrade or that
one or just have a stream of stuff that only our best customers have
access to under the terms of their contract? I think in the long run we
have a better chance of satisfying them with the latter than with
hitting them with six different upgrades. I am a fan of [letting] the
customer decide, OK, I want that piece or this piece. But they are
licensed for all of it. So those are the two things we sought to do.

> That gets back to the trust issue, where if you front-load it, that's
> the big, lumpy upgrade; and if you back-load it with the vision, the
> .Net 2003 servers, you have a long gap in the middle where you have to
> sell into an untrusting audience.

The truth is, we need to be better at both. There are some things you
can only do big and lumpy, like a new file system. It's not like some
sort of small user feature; if you change the file system, then the
storage, the backup, probaby those things are going to change. Probably
the shell ought to change.The applications ... a lot of things are going
to change. Can you call that lumpy? Or you can put out four new features
in PowerPoint, sure -- that would not look lumpy to users.

I think we have to build trust in the model, and we are going to have to
deliver more over time. It will not come overnight. People will have to
see that we do a few things, ... that not all of our innovation is
lumpy, that more of it comes evenly and steadily. People develop a
confidence and faith; they like both aspects of the model. Over time,
our support needs to become more intimately involved in that story.

We know that, but we don't know exactly what that means yet. And this
whole notion of software as a service -- this is not a licensing or
business discussion. It's how does software get rearchitected in the
world of the Internet? I mean, how many software products are
fundamentally different because of the Internet? Not many. Probably the
anti-virus guys keep up the best. They are always feeding new virus
support in. I asked the audience [at Fusion] how many use Windows
Update. Now that's a small piece of software, but it is big. That's the
consumer market; we've got to get that to really purr in the corporate market.

> The lack of broadband build-out and adoption seems to be holding up
> the ability for users to take advantage of some new services you're
> talking about. When Bill [Gates] invested in Comcast cable, it
> triggered the Baby Bells to get on board with DSL. What are you doing
> now to deal with that issue?

The No. 1 thing is, we have to make software that is so compelling that
people will start saying, 'Well, of course I am going to get broadband.'

> And 802.11 is one of those compelling features?

Yes, it is. I was in a hotel in Sun Valley, [Utah], this week that was
not wired. So I turned on my PC, and XP tells me there is a wireless
network available. So I connect to something called Mountaineer. Well, I
don't know what that is. But I have a VPN into Microsoft; it worked. I
don't know whose broadband I used. I didn't see it in Bill's room. I
called him up and said, 'Hey, come over to my room.' So soon everyone is
there and connecting to the Internet through my room.

We have to support all the modalities, whether it is GPRS [General
Packet Radio Service] or 802.11. We have to make it easy to provision
from a software perspective for things that go on with DSL [and] cable
modems. ... And the software has to want a broadband link. There are not
many things you do where you say I really care about the performance. If
I am downloading PowerPoint files, then I want broadband. So when you
can do things with speed that you otherwise can't do without speed, that
is going to put a lot of pressure on the broadband community.

That's the weird answer. The more normal answer is, yeah, isn't it
awful: There is not enough broadband, and the prices they charge ... . I
agree with all that. If you look at what happened in Japan recently,
there was a big drop -- it is now $25 a month for DSL. Vroom. They have
gone from almost no DSL connections a year ago to 1.5 [million] or 1.8
million [subscribers].

> So how do we make that happen in this country?

I think that is beyond us. If there is enough interest where the
consumers are looking intensely for broadband, whether it is at today's
prices or tomorrow's prices, that is going to shake out the
marketplace. And I think the marketplace will do a good job. We just
have to make it something obvious that consumers want. Now I happen to
live in a neigborhood where there is no broadband network. No DSL or
cable modems. Well, I have a neighbor, [Teledesic chairman and co-CEO]
Craig McCaw, who has a wireless network that I think I can piggyback off
of [Ballmer laughs]. So, yes, broadband is a bottleneck -- but I also
think we have to look at oursleves as a software industry and say,
'Aren't we, too, some of that bottleneck?' We have not built software
that makes broadband a must-have.

> Microsoft CEO weighs in
> 
> Ballmer addresses a number of key issues for customers and partners.
> 
> On security and trust: "There are some things I would have done
> differently."
> 
> On coordinating product groups: "We are working hard to make sure
> the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts."  
>
> On product licensing: "We are still going to have to get smart
> about the full ramifications." 


----
aDaM@XeNT.CoM -- long .sig alert!



I believe it is quite possible to productively apply both supposedly
incompatible approaches [REST & SOAP] together.  I'll sketch it out
below, both in prescriptive form.  Note: while this is proscriptive, it
is expected that local adaptations will be provided.

1. Start by modeling the persistent resources that you wish to expose.
By persistent resources, I am referring to entities that have a typical
life expectancy of days or greater.  Ensure that each instance has a
unique URL.  When possible, assign meaningful names to resources.

2. Whenever possible, provide a default XML representation for each
representation.  Unlike traditional object oriented programming
languages where there is a unique getter per property, typically there
will be a single representation of the entire instance.  These
representations will often contain XLinks (a.k.a. pointers or
references) to other instances.

3. Now add high level methods which take care of all composite create,
update, and delete operations.  A key aspect of the design is that
messages for these operations need to be self contained - both the
sender and receiver should be able to make the absolute minimum of
assumptions as to the other's state, and multiple requests should not be
required to implement a single logical operation.  All requests should
provide the appearance of being executed atomically.

4. Query operations deserve special consideration.  A general purpose
XML syntax should be provided in every case.  In addition, when a
reasonable expectation exists that query parameters will be of a
relatively short size and not require significant encoding, then a HTTP
GET with the parameters encoded as a query string should also be
provided.

Implications  

The following table emphasizes how this unified approach differs from
the "pure" (albeit hypothetical) different positions described above.

1. Resource -- POST operations explicitly have the possibility of
modifying multiple resources.  PUT and DELETE operations are rarely
used, if ever.  GETs may contain query arguments.

2. Get -- GETs must never be used for operations which observably change
the state of the recipient.  POST should be used instead.

3. Message -- Do not presume that URLs are static, instead presume that
they identify the resource.  In particular, recognize that URLs can be
dynamically generated.  Expect URLs of other SOAP Resources in
responses.  Use the SOAP Response MEP for pure retrieval operations.

4. Procedure -- Treat the URL itself as the implicit first parameter.
Allow URLs to be dynamically generated, and returned in structures.  Use
HTTP GET for retrieval operations.

Conclusions  

Looking to the future, the application level inter-networking protocols
that emerge today will likely be the application level intra-networking
protocols of the next decade.  Both REST and SOAP contain features that
the others lack.  Most significantly:

REST - SOAP = XLink

The key bit of functionality that SOAP applications miss today is the
ability to link together resources.  SOAP 1.2 makes significant progress
in addressing this.  Hopefully WSDL 1.2 will complete this important work.

SOAP - REST = Stored Procedures

Looking at how other large scale systems cope with updates provides some
key insights into productive areas for future research with respect to REST.

Finally, it bears repeating.  Just because a service is using HTTP GET,
doesn't mean that it is REST.  If you are encoding parameters on the
URL, you are probably making an RPC request of a service, not retrieving
the representation of a resource.  It is worth reading Roy Fielding's
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0181.html> thoughts
on the subject.  The only exception to this rule that is routinely
condoned within the REST crowd is queries.

  -- Sam Ruby, http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/stories/2002/07/20/restSoap.html
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