Q&A With Bill Gates: A Discussion Of HailStorm And Federated Services

Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, spoke with CRN Senior Writer Paula Rooney at Fusion 2001. Part of that interview follows. Return to crn.com for the complete interview.

CRN: How important are partners to your .Net vision?

Gates: Microsoft is totally reliant on partners. We have been forever. We don't have the services or training or solutions-oriented capacity to do everything the customer expects. In the same way when we came up with the vision of the PC, we did not do microprocessor, or manufacturing and we didn't do broad sets of applications to get a critical mass. We initiated an approach totally dependent on partners, and that's very unusual in the computer industry. So this is a key group for us.

CRN: Whose idea was it to have this channel?

It's so hard to say, it was like 20 years ago. The idea we chose was not to be like Oracle in services or IBM in services. Very, very early on we said when we work with PC hardware, we came up with a way that focuses on designing just what we're good at designing: software products. It's natural for us to stick to our core thing and isn't there a way to get other pieces needed through partners. We like to focus on the one piece, which is a very hard piece, the handwriting, the security, development. We've got a lot we're doing that relates to complex software challenges and new scenarios our software can enable.

CRN: What is the status of HailStorm now? Are you still on track to have a beta version out later in 2001?

Gates: Sure. HailStorm is a code name and eventually there will be a product name. It'll be .Net something ... it's the storage piece of .Net just like Passport is the authentication piece of .Net.

CRN: But you'll have something released in 2002?

There will be product deployment sometime in 2002, that's all we've said. HailStorm is a very broad vision, so I wouldn't pick any date to say the ultimate vision is achieved. We went to partners early on with that, and the reaction was amazing. People want to stay in touch with their customers, and the interest level in connecting up with that has been amazing.

CRN: We asked partners what would be the most compelling HailStorm services for corporate customers and they said the presence and authentication ones. What do you think of that?

Gates: I'm glad that's their answer because those are the two things we've been concrete about. When it comes to corporation, the .Net strategy says any one of these services you can run inside your corporation or you can get to it as a service out on the Internet. We think most corporations will choose their own mail servers; small organizations may be different. Take the fact that .Net can take the state of your PC and essentially back it up automatically. People will take our software and run that internally. But some smaller customers and consumers would run it as a service. So most of the .Net thing they can run in the firewall, they will. For those they can't, that run across corporate boundaries, e-commerce or extranet-oriented scenario, you've got to have an authentication strategy. So if you want to share a Web site with a partner and authenticate who the partner is, you have to use Passport because that can connect out past the corporate boundary.

CRN: At Tech Ed, you talked about this Passport-to-Active-Directory link being designed for Windows 2002 or Windows.Net. What is it and how is it different from federated services?

Gates: What it means is that instead of everything being in Passport itself, Passport can be a referring service based on a naming structure. And so if somebody, just a consumer, has their credentials at Passport level, and if someone is in a corporate mode, Passport would refer authentication down to the [authentication] service in that corporation and it would be easy for Active Directory services [in Windows 2000]. It would be easy to set up.

CRN: How important are these corporate federated services, and isn't this Passport-to-Active-Directory an example of one?

Gates: That's right. Federation is key to this, and we need to make this clear. .Net is about a symmetry between services on the Internet, corporate servers and PC clients. When you want to do something, whether scheduling an event or doing IM, the way those work is symmetric across those three levels.

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