Microsoft appears to be in the full-flush of damage control brought on by what Microsoft EVP Steve Ballmer last week called a naive move to thrust ActiveX into an independent standards body, reports sister paper ClieNT Server News . According to what Ballmer said in a press Q&A following his keynote last Thursday at the […]
Microsoft appears to be in the full-flush of damage control brought on by what Microsoft EVP Steve Ballmer last week called a naive move to thrust ActiveX into an independent standards body, reports sister paper ClieNT Server News . According to what Ballmer said in a press Q&A following his keynote last Thursday at the Windows NT Intranet Solutions show in San Francisco, Microsoft is redefining what ActiveX is so the core of Redmond’s precious COM, DCOM and possibly some bits of OLE object technologies remain outside the standards body’s province. For the five months it has existed, ActiveX has been nothing more than an ambiguous marketing term whose published definitions have all conflicted making it easier for Microsoft to declare it anything it wants to. According to an overhead Ballmer threw up last week, ActiveX is limited to controls, scripting, document objects and accessibility. These are the pieces that would be consigned to the prospective standards body, he said, barring outright revolt of the people who attend the ActiveX summit that’s meant to adjourn at some still-unannounced time and place late in September, having been bumped from August. Of course, it should probably be pointed out that Microsoft controls the invitation list though competitors are expecting to attend.To be fair, Ballmer did appear to leave some room for negotiating what would go into the standardization process. As to why Microsoft remains mute on the time and place of the one-day summit which was originally supposed to decide on whether ActiveX would go into a new or existing standards organization and how that transition would be made, Ballmer said, It’s kind of a tricky thing. There’s more political complexity than we anticipated. So we’re taking our time. Ballmer’s statements appear to support the widely-held conclusion that Microsoft’s sudden standards body proposal was hasty and ill-considered as to its ramifications. Its enemies at least have maintained that it would backpedal off it as soon as it could – hence the myriad excuses for the delay.
