“This Monday, February 5, Sun is supposed to wade into the
web services arena with a reportedly thin and vaporous scheme that
it’s code named Jupiter and refers to generically as Smart
Services… Microsoft, which already has its own confusing
and vaporous web services scheme called .NET, a long-term
strategy that it’s organizing the whole company behind, will be
lying in wait in the bushes for Sun to make its appearance armed
with cudgels to beat Jupiter to a pulp.”
“…Microsoft obligingly volunteered a list of 15 questions
that it feels Sun ought to be made to answer before it exits stage
left on Monday. Aside from the irrelevant cheap shots and
self-congratulatory positioning, these 15 questions, one assumes,
point to areas where Microsoft’s intelligence operatives feel
Jupiter is weakest and where Microsoft will attempt to propagandize
so we thought it best they be circulated as a way to fan away some
of the smoke from the twin barrages.”
“We should perhaps point out that .NET and by report Jupiter
seek to exploit XML, the Extensible Markup Language, and SOAP, the
Simple Object Access Protocol. Jupiter, we have heard, does not
include Jini, Sun’s scheme for attaching widgetry to the web, but
is shot through with Java and LDAP. Anyway, here is what
Microsoft’s public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom, stuffed in our
e-mail late Friday…”