First, I'm an IBMer. These are my views. IBM does not necessarily agree with them.
Second, I think most of you will agree that I'm relatively friendly towards Microsoft when they may a positive OSS move. I am not anti-Microsoft just because it's cool to love Apple these days.
With those two items out of the way, I couldn't help but shake my head when reading about Microsoft's Oslo project for "model-centric apps".
An InfoWorld article describes Oslo:
"With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall."
Another description comes from Tim Rayburn's blog (via Google):
"Oslo is not a product, but rather an over-arching project which will contain within it updates to many products and services including BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, and more. "
"..extends SOA beyond the firewall"...oh, you mean to companies that aren't Microsoft shops? Great, tell me more! I read and re-read the IW article & Tim's blog to see if there is any mention of non-Microsoft technologies. You know, SOA and especially Composite Applications, are supposed to be about heterogeneous environments. I didn't find a thing that leads me to believe that Oslo has much to do with interoperability. So, "extends SOA beyond the firewall" should really say "extends SOA beyond the firewall from one 100% Microsoft shop to another 100% Microsoft shop"
Next, for those of us who think standards are generally good ideas...IW sets us straight:
"Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter...A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository."
Anywho, it's all vaporware and likely will be well beyond 2010 (Massimo is being overly generous when he suggests 2009):
"It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.
Microsoft, open you eyes...your "SOA" customers care about more than .NET and all customers benefit from open standards. This is not a new news.