Why does Microsoft have so many eforms technologies? ...which ones are strategic? Billg and StevenSi offer some answers
Checkout the live webcast @ http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/seminar/en/20050204_bgateskeynote/manifest.xml&rate=1 and skip ahead to minute 52:00 (exactly ;-).
Here's a transcript:
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Michael Herman, from Parallelspace Corporation. It's nice to see Microsoft consolidating around a smaller set of core technologies. But, when it comes to electronic forms, Word and Excel have their own point solution. Outlook has its own point solution. InfoPath has its own point solution. Access has its own point solution. In the developer platform, you have ASP.NET and WinForms. We're constantly in a situation we're trying to guess which ones are strategic. Can you give us some insight?
BILL GATES: You can start on that.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Do you want to beat me up? Or- I think that was-
BILL GATES: There's some truth in that question.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Well, I think it was- I'm thinking in that short period of time, he summarized the last 10 or 12- one- ones that we've had talking about this issue.
BILL GATES: Well, he didn't get Avalon though. But [unintelligible]
STEVE SINOFSKY: I think it's a- that's a very good summary. I honestly think it's a very fair assessment, and a very fair critique of the challenge that we face. For me, I think back the slide that you used, Bill, about rich client and thin client, and the trade-offs that you have to make. I think for us in the forms space, we're constantly battling these kinds of trade-offs, but probably a little higher up the stack. Do we want the calculations behind Excel? Do we want the rich editing in Word? Do we want the thin deployment of ASP.NET? There- all of these trade-offs. We just struggle with trying to have the one that solves all of the problems. I think that that leads to this well, depending on the audience and the timing, this seems to be the most important one at the time.
What I can say is, for sure all of the ones you mentioned, we're going to continue to support for a very long time. It's really important to understand that we're behind. Even if we release something and you see another presentation that points out something else might be new and improved, we do continue to support them for a very long time. That said, it's a- where we are now in the Office System, in particular, I think you're seeing us on the Web-based side focusing on SharePoint Products and Technologies, and on the Client-based side focusing on InfoPath and that level of integration. For me, InfoPath pulls together all of the elements that Bill talked about today in terms of it has the rich-client interface. It has improvements in deployability and management. It's XML-based, and it has all the connectivity to Web Services.
I think I'll take a risk. Have many of you looked at InfoPath, and investigated InfoPath, and thought about it at all? Because those of you that have, you're probably asking us about where's the thin-client element of it so we kind of hit that right away. That's clearly some feedback that we've got and some things that we need to work on. Then maybe you could add a longer-term view, or more.
BILL GATES: No, I think that hits it. They- today, a little bit you have to think of HTML, and then our rich forms where InfoPath is the one that's definitely on the rise there. What we want to get to is where InfoPath's at the high-level, then we have all these rich controls you can use, and underneath we have the Avalon runtime. We have a roadmap for InfoPath where it gets richer and richer, embraces our rich controls, and sits on the latest presentation system. We also have some ways that if you do your work in InfoPath in future versions, we'll be able to project that onto classic HTML, although today you have to think, do you want to be pure HTML or be able to assume InfoPath? That's the one that will rise in usage even as we're compatible with everything we've got.
As Chief Software Architect, drawing these roadmaps and making them clear is a pretty important thing. Forms is the one that it's taken us a long time to get a clear message out.
----------------------------------------