Windows Server Boss Calls WebSphere a 'Marketecture'

by Alex Woodie

A top server official with Microsoft says competitor IBM's WebSphere product suite is nothing but a marketing architecture, or "marketecture." "It's a bunch of branding [that] pulls their family of products together and gives them something to talk about," Windows server chief Paul Flessner said to his audience at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto last week. While the sprawling WebSphere suite is no newbie to such barbs, Flessner's comments serve to highlight Microsoft's ambitious plans to streamline its own middleware stack.

Microsoft's .NET server strategy has had its share of marketing-driven twists and turns. Its .NET server architecture was originally supposed to bloom in late 2001 with the "Whistler" kicker to Windows 2000 Server, and after a series of delays and name changes this product eventually shipped in spring 2003 as Windows Server 2003. When Microsoft announced its .NET plans in early 2001, it was perhaps the finest example of marketecture on the planet, and everybody knew it.

Three-and-a-half years later, Microsoft has made big strides. Its operating systems, particularly Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, are much improved over Windows 98 and Windows NT 4, and its developer base, anchored by the Visual Studio 2003 tool and the wide variety of languages it supports, is the envy of the industry. We're still not 100 percent sure what .NET, Web services, or "service-oriented architectures" are, or what they mean to us, but that's okay. We've seen Microsoft, with the biggest R&D budget in the industry, follow through, to some extent, on the tall claims it made back in 2001, and people are buying into the vision and jumping on the .NET bandwagon, which is really the only other bandwagon to jump on besides enterprise Java, in which WebSphere is the major player.

But where exactly the WebSphere bandwagon starts and where it stops is sometimes hard to tell. The IBM Web site currently lists 97 different products and services under the WebSphere umbrella, a wide variety of development tools, runtime tools, and various versions of industry-specific products--sometimes different ones for each of the major operating systems IBM supports, including Windows, Linux, OS/400, AIX, and z/OS.

So when Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft's server platform division, says that he and his fellow Microsoft executives considered creating their own umbrella brand, such as IBM's WebSphere, that is what he means by a marketecture. "We talked a lot about whether we were going to do this as a company, should we introduce a new brand, what does it mean?" Flessner said at the conference during his keynote last week, according to the transcript on Microsoft's Web site. "And my perspective on it was, look, we can't introduce a new brand unless it means something."

"I'm going to whack IBM here, and maybe, if there's somebody from IBM, I apologize, but in my perspective, WebSphere is a marketecture. It really is about a marketing architecture, it's a bunch of branding, it pulls their family of products together and gives them something to talk about, in terms of a family of products, but it has no real meat to it. There's no technical criteria to it. It doesn't mean anything from a value-to-the-end-customer perspective."

By "technical criteria," Flessner undoubtedly meant something like the Common Engineering Roadmap, which is a plan Microsoft announced earlier this year that involves standardizing its Windows Server System stack of middleware on common infrastructure components, such as systems management, the Windows installer, and patch management (see "Windows Server System Gets Integrated Roadmap").

Microsoft has $60 billion in the bank, the largest R&D budget in the IT world, and momentum on its side. If the Redmond, Washington, software giant has the same level of success integrating its server components as it has had integrating its desktop software, it will make it even harder for its competitors with Java-based Web architectures, like IBM, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle, to compete, especially if Microsoft prices its software aggressively.