Microsoft tightens its grip on the web

Windows XP and the .Net application development environment aren't just new products. They're a stunningly aggressive (and far-sighted) takeover bid for the software industry. It's all legal, assuming that Microsoft behaves itself. But it's frightening stuff.

The software giant knows that we have to replace the crude first generation of standalone web applications that force end users to do the donkey work, and which can't even talk to each other properly. The more sophisticated second generation, known as web services applications, will interact with each other automatically.

The new apps can swap information and services in the background, allowing websites and businesses to collaborate powerfully. This is true ecommerce.

This second generation of applications will finally make the web a profitable experience for consumers and businesses. And Microsoft wants to supply the technology to control that process.

It wants to own ecommerce, just like it owns your desktop. As before, the strategy is to bundle technologies to form compelling, attractive and cheap products that make life easier for developers and users. This strategy is already happening.

Take Windows XP. It comes with built-in instant messaging, the Windows Messenger. Analyst Gartner reckons that messaging will overtake email as the chief online communication tool within five years. Those second-generation websites and programs will use messaging as their primary contact with users.

If Windows Messenger destroys AOL's messaging service the way Explorer destroyed Navigator, Microsoft will effectively control web messaging technology.

Passports please

Windows XP aggressively pushes consumers into adopting Passport, a useful web services technology letting sites automatically share confidential information without human intervention. Using Windows Messenger requires a Passport account, by the way.

If XP makes Passport a de facto standard for software writers, Microsoft will control a crucial part of the way websites collaborate. Passport is also behind a huge range of online services that Microsoft plans to rent to businesses and consumers.

Want to use the next version of the Windows Media video streamer? Better upgrade to XP because it probably won't work with anything else. And while you're at it, sign up for Windows Messenger and Passport. Resistance is futile.

Microsoft has the right to innovate. It also has the right to combine technologies to form attractive and cheap product lines that blow the opposition out of the water - even if that creates a near monopoly.

If you hate virtual monopolies, then buy from other suppliers. Let the market decide - but it must be a fair fight. And Microsoft doesn't always play fair. Ask the US Appeals Court. It's used the massive power of Windows to make software and hardware suppliers adopt its technologies and products - and hobble those of rivals.

If Microsoft forces its web services technologies onto the industry to the exclusion of others, we're in a new world. Microsoft won't just be the 800-pound gorilla, it will be the jungle itself.

That may happen anyway, but let it be by fair means, not foul. Microsoft has to win this game by innovating, not by bullying.