“Wasting no time in reacting to Microsoft Corp.’s wide-ranging
plan to turn its software into Web-based services, industry
officials today said the announcement was hardly a lightning bolt
of brilliance but rather an admission of where the market is
headed. “It’s not a breakthrough,” said Steve Mills, general
manager of IBM’s software group solutions and strategies. “This is
not some new vision of computing they uniquely thought up. It’s in
response to what customers want.”
“What they’re doing is in response to changes happening in the
marketplace that many vendors, IBM included, have been taking
advantage of and that they’ve been left out of,” Mills continued.
“The model for deploying IT systems has changed, and the Internet
is the primary driver of that. Companies these days are not doing
what they were doing in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”
“Everyone recognizes the world is heading to a great degree to
applications being delivered over wire,” said Bernie Thompson,
president of VistaSource Inc. in Westboro, Mass., a software
company whose Java office suite is in beta right now. Thompson
viewed Microsoft’s grand unveiling as an attempt to freeze the
market and give the company a chance to catch up.”