SAN FRANCISCO -– The future of e-business can be summed up in three words, according to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer:
Share your data.
And the tool to carry out Microsoft's version of the future also comes in three words: eXtensible Markup Language, or XML.
Read more in E-Biz- - - - - -
In a Monday press conference that outlined his company's e-business future, Ballmer stressed that consumers will require personalized service, which requires the consolidation of personal data stored on the Web sites they use.
That means that data has to be readily accessible to developers and e-commerce partners to ensure a speedy transaction.
The way to do that is to use XML, a markup language designed by the World Wide Web Consortium that provides a consistent method to describe and categorize data.
Web services, such as financial and shopping services, will then be able to "empower people anytime, any place, and on any device," Ballmer said.
In a humorous and rather ironic incident during the press conference, Ballmer's speech was interrupted for several minutes when the hotel's public address system began broadcasting the proceedings of an adjacent jewelry convention.
The crowd of media clapped in mock support when it was announced that sales of jewelry were up 32 percent in the company's eastern region.
Sharing information, indeed.
Ballmer said that commerce companies need to convert all of their vital data -- including product catalogs, financial data, and inventory information -- into XML so that application developers can customize and redistribute the data.
"XML will be remembered as the secret sauce for the Net for the late '90s," Ballmer said.
In a "drag-and-drop" demonstration, Ballmer copied data from an e-commerce Web site into Outlook and Visual Basic software. Both programs were able to understand and display all of the site's catalog data.
Developers can then take that information and develop applications for consumers that will collect and organize, for example, all their financial information so that they can conduct stock transactions or apply for loans.
Or, there will be applications that coordinate the consumer's personal buying preferences and compile matching lists of products from a variety of e-commerce sites.
This new class of Web services will also be able to deliver information beyond the browser, to pagers and cell phones, Ballmer said.
Passport's new "mega-service," Ballmer said, could be used to authenticate a customer's identity and complete transactions. But Ballmer barely mentioned the issues of security and privacy, other than to say he pledged support for the PKI and Kerberos encryption standards.
Although Microsoft gave several examples of how financial services could interact to coordinate all corporate or individual transactions, no financial institutions were brought on stage in support.
However, Nordstrom.com CEO Dan Nordstrom previewed upcoming personalization enhancements to his Web site using Microsoft's technologies.
In addition to Nordstrom, British consumer-goods seller Marks and Spencer, which runs the "world's busiest store," said it was replacing its existing transaction infrastructure with Microsoft technology.
Microsoft is also scaling up its efforts aimed at Web hosting services. The company announced the AppCenter Server for monitoring distributed Web server farms, and also disclosed it would be creating software aimed at integrating Web hosting services.
Also making e-business announcements in San Francisco was IBM, which unveiled a new line of servers aimed at Net service providers. The company is targeting the RS/6000 enterprise line of servers at ISPs and application service providers. The 64-bit servers support up to 24 processors, run Unix or Linux, and will compete with servers running Windows NT and Sun Solaris.
