Well, it's easy to pick on Microsoft around security issues. And .Net definitely has its share of problematic areas around security for applications. I know that there have been some issues with running applications in their secure sandbox and knowing that you can rely on the security parameters that you're setting up around the application. It's not so much a problem of it being insecure as it is of it being a complex environment to run an application in. So you start having issues around whether your application is running safely in that environment and what you can do and what you can't do.

There's a set of things that Microsoft can fix and there's a set of things that development tools like ours can fix. We've always been able to make it easier to develop for the Microsoft operating system than Microsoft has.

So bringing things back to Web services--one of the fundamental ideas that .Net was built on--what's your take on where we're headed?

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One of the funny things that happened on the way to the altar as everyone decided to get married to Web services is that the fundamental difference in Web services got lost. One of the things that's different between Web services and CORBA is that CORBA is really a very transactionally oriented technology that's intended for synchronous communications between applications. And Web services is really this new, interesting idea of asynchronous communications and message-based or service-based architectures.

So what is it everybody wants to do? They want to take Web services and pound it back into the transactional, synchronous communications model they already know how to program to.

I'm hopeful that a new generation of software architects will ultimately comprehend the value and applicability of the looser, message-based architecture and you'll see all sorts of new kinds of things emerge--but that takes time. That takes a lot of time. And in the meantime, I think we're going to see a world in which each of the different platform vendors try to use Web services as a way to promise interoperability with their competitors, while at the same trying to differentiate themselves by creating a "better" implementation of the technology within their own stack. And so you see Microsoft saying, "Yeah, .Net does communicate with other non-.Net services technologies, but boy, if you use it in a .Net environment, it's faster, it's more secure, it's more reliable."

Well, everybody has to make money, right?

Well, I guess it's a just question of…at what level do you create highways and make sure that they're the right width for all the vehicles…and make sure the vehicles aren't too wide...and at what point do you add ski racks to some of them. I think we're still at the point of building highways. I'm disappointed that the marketplace is differentiating too early.

Is .Net a more elegant solution? TalkBack below or e-mail Eric.

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