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Gates’ latest vision brings controversy
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: February 14 2006 23:57 | Last updated: February 14 2006 23:57
Whenever Bill Gates has a vision for the future of the software industry, alarm bells are likely to sound somewhere – whether in the offices of anti-trust regulators, competitors, or a press that is always on the look out for new evidence that the world’s largest software company is about to start throwing its weight around again.
So it is not surprising that the Microsoft chairman was so eager on Tuesday to defend his latest vision for a more secure online world against familiar charges that Microsoft is really bent on a new plan to extend its desktop monopoly to the broader internet.
Certainly, the latest vision – which Mr Gates calls the “trusted ecosystem” – brings with it echoes of controversial ideas that the company has espoused before.
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In a speech outlining his vision at the annual RSA computer security conference on Tuesday, Mr Gates argued that the increasingly interconnected online world needs a stronger underpinning to give both internet users and service providers a greater level of trust that they know who they are dealing with.
That trust would come from an arrangement for different internet services to share identity information about their customers, so that people could move freely about the web without needing to prove who they are to every website they visit. One contribution to this, announced by Microsoft yesterday: InfoCard, a service that would let users enter their personal details in a way that could be shared with other internet companies.
For long-time Microsoft watchers, this all carries echoes of Hailstorm, a controversial plan that Mr Gates outlined at the height of the dotcom boom but later dropped after extensive criticism. Under Hailstorm, users would have entered their personal data on a Microsoft service, and then used this as they moved around the internet.
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Even now, Mr Gates is eager to defend Hailstorm. “It wasn’t a plot to be the central root of trust or anything like that, but it was perceived as such,” he said yesterday in an interview with the Financial Times.
Asked to explain how his vision has changed since the Hailstorm days, however, he is less clear. “We partly didn’t know what it was, and certainly what the press said it was wasn’t what we thought it was, but even what we thought it was we didn’t end up doing all of that. That’s old history.”
The latest vision, however, turns on a more open technological architecture.
“There’s no central node in this thing at all, there never can be,” says Mr Gates. “It’s totally standards based and totally open. It runs on all platforms. It’s a series of standards that we’ve worked on – in fact, IBM has been one of the key participants in these standards.”
For Microsoft, it seems, any big new step in the field of security is likely to be fraught with the sort of questions that are prompted by the vision of a “trusted ecosystem”. Earlier this month, for instance, the software company announced final plans to launch its own anti-virus software product, a rival to established software produced by companies like Symantec and McAfee.
Had he had free rein, it seems, Mr Gates would have opted to “bundle” this software into the Windows operating system, making it free for all users of the pervasive desktop operating system.
“It’s not a huge revenue opportunity,” Mr Gates says of Microsoft’s venture into the security software business. “It’s more an opportunity to make sure the Windows platform is preferred because its got security built in.”
Yet the risk of being seen to have squashed a group of independent security software companies has played its part in prompting Microsoft to charge separately for the product instead. Asked if anti-trust considerations had featured in the decision, Mr Gates said: “Yes. The decision to leave AV outside… there’s so many factors that weigh into it. But certainly, we looked at that as one factor, how people will respond.” |
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