Saturday, November 08, 2003

Chris Sells and the Royal *We*

I just saw where Chris Sells of Microsoft was being questioned about the use of the word 'we':
In the '90s, we invented component technologies, like COM and Java, to bring DLLs into memory and we were very proud of ourselves.

Some of the readers were confused, thinking that Microsoft was claiming that they invented Java. But I understood, instead of "we", he meant to say, "people other than me and my company".

But then he goes on...
Unfortunately, we were so proud that we stretched the metaphor too far with technologies like DCOM, CORBA, and Java RMI. The problem is the idea of a proxy, which was designed to serve as an in-process stand-in for the remote code, hiding the fact that each method call was a round-trip of uncertain duration and uneven reliability. Indigo, on the other hand, is a platform technology that breaks from this metaphor to use a decidedly different way of connecting applications together. Specifically, Indigo uses services, not components, to model reusable units of code.

Holy shit - MICROSOFT USES SERVICES - why didn't the CORBA people think of that??? ROTFL
That's great... unlike DCE and CORBA, we (Chris + Microsoft + Indigo) use services.

Chris, with all due respect, it would be reading a book on the history of distributed computing, then rewriting your article.


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