L. F. (Felipe) Cabrera, Ph.D., is talking about Microsoft Web services. He’s trying too hard to convince the crowd that he’s a fellow geek even as he re-cycles a generic Microsoft slide set about Web services. (We know it’s recycled since he keeps telling us that we’re too smart to need this slide or that. )

Four design principles: Modular and composable; general purpose, standards-based and federated. Felipe elaborates on the importance of federation: “no central point of administration, control or failure.” “Federation forces you to respect all these different degrees of autonomy.” He’s stressing this obviously because Microsoft has been late to the federation party. Microsoft is focused on standards and interoperability, he says.

He’s begging us to interrupt him with questions. He thinks we’re “not awake.” [Or, perhaps he’s just not being interesting enough.]

Now Tim O’Reilly is saying that the barrier to entry is too high because there is such a high stack of specifications. Felipe says that IP was once a technical hurdle. There’s a stack of specs because people want to do different things with distributed computing. Microsoft wants us to get to the point where the stack of specs is just taken for granted.

Judi Clark asks if Microsoft is now willing to work on open standards. “Absolutely,” says Felipe. “We hire more people to work on standards than lawyers,” he says to laughter and applause. But then he appends: “That’s Felipe’s perception.” And, he adds, “A clean design is better than a committee design.” [Ominous!]

Greg Elin asks if GPL is a guarantee of acces to code. What is the documented promise that what Microsoft says today will be valid in 2-3 years.

Felipe responds: “What’s GPL?” and totally loses the audience.

Question: Microsoft isn’t there with interoperability.

Answer: Yeah, it drives us crazy.

Question: In defense of MSFT, much of the problem comes from the XML Schema spec which is a nightmare.

Saman Far: How about having a reference implementation available in an open source way? Have you considered having the source available for the protocol stack implementations?

Answer: It has been hotly debated. I’m just a techie.

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