Say What?

  • Article

Interesting perspective from Randy Heffner (Forrester) in the latest issue of Redmond Magazine:

"...when you talk about standards that affect internally how things go, then Microsoft doesn't play in that ecosystem nearly as much." - Randy Heffner, Forrester analyst

Perhaps Randy is unaware of our work on XML, SOAP and the Web Services Workshops that led to the WS-* specifications.  

The quote above seems to be inspired by current OASIS activities associated with SCA.  Conflating multi-platform WS-* specifications and standards with what have traditionally been Java-oriented initiatives is, I think, somewhat misleading.    (While SCA is not exclusively Java, the SCA initiative has been largely driven by Java vendors.)  

Regardless of this confusion, I think movement of these initiatives to OASIS is a good one - although I would have preferred to see the specs become a series of OASIS Technical Committees instead of a separate Member Section (the governance difference between these types of groups is really unclear to me).