I was on the performance dev team in Office9. Our job was to 'help' others keep their memory footprint down, but boy it isn't easy to go troubleshoot someone else's code, make it smaller and faster. So anyway, early on in the cycle, I notice I've got a process in the tray (did we call it that then?) called 'Store', and the only UI element was 'Exit'. Of course, it's early, whatever UI there's to be just isn't there yet. But all I could tell was, it was consuming an enormous amount of memory - like as much as Word/Excel/Outlook combined - and when I clicked 'Exit', I could see no difference on my machine whatsoever. So I sent mail, probably to way too many people, saying "I don't know what store.exe is, but I don't like it." I was given a mild talking-to, team spirit and all, but hey I was perf for gosh sake, and some folk did whisper that they rather agreed.
I worked on Outlook 98, but on the split off team doing other platforms under Kurt Delbene, who had just moved over from Exchange. We worked on Outlook Web Access, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook (in Java!) I am one of the few people in history that has sent and received an email using Outlook Java 🏆
I think people generally misunderstand this to be some form of “evil” when in fact all of 20th century business was based on proprietary standards, secret formulas, and patents. It is just how things worked. Bill saw how the lack of proprietary standards for PC hardware benefitted Microsoft enormously at the expense of OEMs which had a super difficult job (though Dell, for example, did enormously well even to this day). At the same time he didn’t want Microsoft to be in that same position and believed strongly that the scale of software developers required for the worlds software (if only he had said software eating the world) meant that having one standard for software controlled by one company would be a net benefit. That’s why Windows in effect was so open, just not the way people in places like Open Software Foundation wanted at the time.
The world likes standards controlled by companies until the company becomes too big or has too large a slice of the economic pie. Generally the world does not like government imposed standards. And generally, the world does not like the chaos of many standards. Yet the world likes to talk about open. That’s where we are ;-)
The problem is “the world” is really made up of many individuals and individual companies, and each one of those has a specific opinion that precludes all the others. It makes it easy to be partisan or polarized in this discussion yet the sum of all these tends to “work out”. There are few instances where having intellectual property or being proprietary produces sustainable “evil” results. The market tends to correct for this IMO.
"a protocol known as DAV, which was previously a contentious topic discussed earlier in this chapter." I'd like to see that. I missed it somehow and my search feature is failing me.
I was semi-involved with webDAV from the outset, and watching the Microsoft co-leader was, umm, interesting in a social-science way. My engagement was from the DMA/ODMA side of things where the greater angst would be over SharePoint (after Lotus Notes earlier). Xerox DocuShare dropped a stitch for really stupid reasons although I see it is still alive and kicking. The DocuShare folk misunderstood DAV as well. This was all before I dented my sword on ODF/OOXML and broke it completely on OpenOffice :).
Office was really into trying to make ODMA work for Office 97 (Mike Kelly is here somewhere and was a leader on those efforts). There was a challenge once sharepoint entered the picture (later than this—Office XP/2002 in March 2002). The standard for ODMA started to subsume a different layering than we had envisioned and just made it technically more than we wanted to do in terms of where we intended to have APIs and UI.
DAV was tossed around quite a bit. Was it a protocol for adding semantics to POST to enable save? Was it a competitor/replacement for SMB? Exchange Platinum used it to enable a drive mapping to the mail store so you could do file operations at hte command line—this was a key part of the Web Store scenario. It had poor performance and semantics were different enough that it was not really something we could use from Apps (for all the talk, it turns out replacing a file system on NT was mostly impossible).
So a lot there. I didn’t intend to go into the technical details so hope this is a fun bit of history at least from my side.
I recall that a woman from Microsoft attended the initial ODMA meeting and was then on leave. I hosted the second meeting at Xerox PARC and began lobbying for the in-process COM-based integration on the DMS side There is no question that Word integration was crucial and remained so. I took over ODMA maintenance under AIIM auspices and now we are both out of that business (and I have no idea why the site I provided still gets so many visits).
Until recently, my previous effort to produce serious public code was for a Java JNI integration that would allow Java clients to access the ODMA DLL and thereby reach the registered repository integrations on the desktop. Lordy, that was in 2007. I must be having fun. https://nuovodoc.com/products/ODMJNI10.htm
The killer, and abandonment of my effort, was determination that, while Word still had its ODMA bridge, the GUI handling and dealing with modal dialogs from the DMS via a single hWnd was failing, at least with GroupWise, the poster-child ODMA-enabled DMS at that time. (The ODMA integration in OpenOffice.org was simply wrong, basically being hardwired for Novell GroupWise. The maintainer did not understand how to do DLL discovery and run-time entry-point binding.)
The latest try at this was web integration via OASIS CMIS. The prospect of SharePoint support was crucial. I didn't follow that. There were a variety of strong participants and Redmond hosted the one in-person meeting I attended.
I thought the WOSA model was great though. I used it in pitches on Document Enabled Networking (later merged into DMA) to Novell. The conceptual clash there was that, since the Novell server had a directory service, and the directory was really a database, shouldn't an on-server DMS use that repository? Eastman Software had the same challenge in providing Image Enabled Networking. We (Xerox XSoft) refused to swallow that pill and we soon parted ways as Novell decided to pursue some email-tied approach (akin to the Exchange database confusion, I suppose).
I was on the performance dev team in Office9. Our job was to 'help' others keep their memory footprint down, but boy it isn't easy to go troubleshoot someone else's code, make it smaller and faster. So anyway, early on in the cycle, I notice I've got a process in the tray (did we call it that then?) called 'Store', and the only UI element was 'Exit'. Of course, it's early, whatever UI there's to be just isn't there yet. But all I could tell was, it was consuming an enormous amount of memory - like as much as Word/Excel/Outlook combined - and when I clicked 'Exit', I could see no difference on my machine whatsoever. So I sent mail, probably to way too many people, saying "I don't know what store.exe is, but I don't like it." I was given a mild talking-to, team spirit and all, but hey I was perf for gosh sake, and some folk did whisper that they rather agreed.
This is a good one! I wasn't even sure if it made it into builds. Now we know!! Repeat for Office10. And 11.
I worked on Outlook 98, but on the split off team doing other platforms under Kurt Delbene, who had just moved over from Exchange. We worked on Outlook Web Access, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook (in Java!) I am one of the few people in history that has sent and received an email using Outlook Java 🏆
Great chapter. Why was Bill G so intent on proprietary standards?
I think people generally misunderstand this to be some form of “evil” when in fact all of 20th century business was based on proprietary standards, secret formulas, and patents. It is just how things worked. Bill saw how the lack of proprietary standards for PC hardware benefitted Microsoft enormously at the expense of OEMs which had a super difficult job (though Dell, for example, did enormously well even to this day). At the same time he didn’t want Microsoft to be in that same position and believed strongly that the scale of software developers required for the worlds software (if only he had said software eating the world) meant that having one standard for software controlled by one company would be a net benefit. That’s why Windows in effect was so open, just not the way people in places like Open Software Foundation wanted at the time.
The world likes standards controlled by companies until the company becomes too big or has too large a slice of the economic pie. Generally the world does not like government imposed standards. And generally, the world does not like the chaos of many standards. Yet the world likes to talk about open. That’s where we are ;-)
The problem is “the world” is really made up of many individuals and individual companies, and each one of those has a specific opinion that precludes all the others. It makes it easy to be partisan or polarized in this discussion yet the sum of all these tends to “work out”. There are few instances where having intellectual property or being proprietary produces sustainable “evil” results. The market tends to correct for this IMO.
"a protocol known as DAV, which was previously a contentious topic discussed earlier in this chapter." I'd like to see that. I missed it somehow and my search feature is failing me.
I was semi-involved with webDAV from the outset, and watching the Microsoft co-leader was, umm, interesting in a social-science way. My engagement was from the DMA/ODMA side of things where the greater angst would be over SharePoint (after Lotus Notes earlier). Xerox DocuShare dropped a stitch for really stupid reasons although I see it is still alive and kicking. The DocuShare folk misunderstood DAV as well. This was all before I dented my sword on ODF/OOXML and broke it completely on OpenOffice :).
I discussed this in https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/051-html-opportunity-disruption-or especially in the email reply I shared.
Office was really into trying to make ODMA work for Office 97 (Mike Kelly is here somewhere and was a leader on those efforts). There was a challenge once sharepoint entered the picture (later than this—Office XP/2002 in March 2002). The standard for ODMA started to subsume a different layering than we had envisioned and just made it technically more than we wanted to do in terms of where we intended to have APIs and UI.
DAV was tossed around quite a bit. Was it a protocol for adding semantics to POST to enable save? Was it a competitor/replacement for SMB? Exchange Platinum used it to enable a drive mapping to the mail store so you could do file operations at hte command line—this was a key part of the Web Store scenario. It had poor performance and semantics were different enough that it was not really something we could use from Apps (for all the talk, it turns out replacing a file system on NT was mostly impossible).
So a lot there. I didn’t intend to go into the technical details so hope this is a fun bit of history at least from my side.
I recall that a woman from Microsoft attended the initial ODMA meeting and was then on leave. I hosted the second meeting at Xerox PARC and began lobbying for the in-process COM-based integration on the DMS side There is no question that Word integration was crucial and remained so. I took over ODMA maintenance under AIIM auspices and now we are both out of that business (and I have no idea why the site I provided still gets so many visits).
Until recently, my previous effort to produce serious public code was for a Java JNI integration that would allow Java clients to access the ODMA DLL and thereby reach the registered repository integrations on the desktop. Lordy, that was in 2007. I must be having fun. https://nuovodoc.com/products/ODMJNI10.htm
The killer, and abandonment of my effort, was determination that, while Word still had its ODMA bridge, the GUI handling and dealing with modal dialogs from the DMS via a single hWnd was failing, at least with GroupWise, the poster-child ODMA-enabled DMS at that time. (The ODMA integration in OpenOffice.org was simply wrong, basically being hardwired for Novell GroupWise. The maintainer did not understand how to do DLL discovery and run-time entry-point binding.)
The latest try at this was web integration via OASIS CMIS. The prospect of SharePoint support was crucial. I didn't follow that. There were a variety of strong participants and Redmond hosted the one in-person meeting I attended.
I thought the WOSA model was great though. I used it in pitches on Document Enabled Networking (later merged into DMA) to Novell. The conceptual clash there was that, since the Novell server had a directory service, and the directory was really a database, shouldn't an on-server DMS use that repository? Eastman Software had the same challenge in providing Image Enabled Networking. We (Xerox XSoft) refused to swallow that pill and we soon parted ways as Novell decided to pursue some email-tied approach (akin to the Exchange database confusion, I suppose).