What's up with HailStorm?
Yesterday, reacting to a story from an InfoWorld conference, I wrote a short piece about how Microsoft's My Services initiative, their plan to offer end-user-based web services on a subscription basis, seemed to be back on track. The April/May issue of Xml and Web Services Magazine included several technical pieces on My Services (still widely known by its memorable code name "HailStorm") that didn't deviate technically from the alpha code distributed at last October's Professional Developers Conference. And the InfoWorld report, based on a presentation by My Services technical lead Mark Lucovsky, essentially repeated the message from six months ago.
One errant mouse-click consigned my piece to oblivion (I've resolved not to write in the Radio browser window again until the model changes--right now, browsing to another window empties the text-editing box with no safety mechanism), and today I'm glad it did. A New York Times piece by John Markoff entitled "Microsoft Has Shelved Its Internet 'Persona' Service" has significantly clouded the My Services picture.
Dave Winer paraphrased the story as "HailStorm died a quiet death," a reasonable gloss on the Times headline but not an accurate summary of the article. Later, Winer did include a reaction from Microsoft that "the Markoff story isn't exactly correct." In Markoff's defense, it would appear that the story is a lot closer to correct than its headline.
A month or so ago, CNET ran a story reporting that the executive in charge of HailStorm had been reassigned because the service still did not have a realistic business plan. Markoff's story is along the same lines. The only Microsoft source he cites (way down in the ninth paragraph) says "Microsoft executives acknowledged the shift in strategy and said the company was still contemplating how it would bring out a revised version of the My Services technology." Lucovsky's presence at a high-visibility conference would be unlikely if his project had really been shelved.
Apparently, the HailStorm business plan was based on wooing major corporate partners for a Microsoft-controlled service. This was the "unrealistic" part, as no major partner was forthcoming.
My guess is that the services will trickle out slowly through existing Microsoft products rather than as a separately-branded offering. The services were designed to build on three Microsoft properties: Passport, HotMail and MSN Instant Messenger. Passport was central to the initiative as the authentication mechanism the services would use; until we see Microsoft dropping the transition of Passport to a Kerberos-based system, there's no reason to see a change in strategy here. If Instant Messenger moves to using the SOAP messenging protocol, in keeping with Microsoft's technical direction, it too will move into the HailStorm orbit. Indications are the HotMail team was slower to move to the My Services model, but they were surely being wooed internally; email was also a part of the My Services plan.
9:17:39 AM 
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