Flessner leads Microsoft's plans to bring these Web services into the IT departments of large corporations. The company wants to do on the Internet what it's done on the desktop: make it possible for developers to write applications with off-the-shelf components.
The Hailstorm platform will be like a half-built skyscraper. It will offer basic Web services, such as a notification service to contact a user, so developers can simply add them to their own applications and finish the building. To house all this information, Microsoft will build and operate – at a projected cost of more than $50 million per year, according to one source – a network of secure data centers capable of hosting the data of 100 million users.
Flessner pumps the air with both fists and flashes a great grin. "We are on the verge of weaving together our assets on the desktop, on the server and on the Internet."
Hailstorm services will begin rolling out next year.
Developers and software vendors seem impressed. "This will bridge to the anti-Microsoft camp in a big way," says Navin Chaddha, CEO of online services company Rivio, who sold his first company, vXtreme, to Microsoft for $75 million in 1997.
It's a measure of the company's renewed confidence that Microsoft executives aren't shy about leveraging existing products to help open a new market – in the same way the company notoriously used its Windows operating system to give Internet Explorer a boost. At the recent Hailstorm launch, Gates declared that the imminent new XP versions of Windows and Office will have built-in support for Hailstorm services.
Because of its putative embrace of open standards, however, the reigning desktop monopolist foresees no new antitrust problem. "It's a level playing field," says Flessner. "There's nothing proprietary about this."
