San Francisco Ð One week after NeXT and Sun announced their OpenStep alliance, Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital) raised the stakes with a move to make their own object systems interoperable.
The two announcements are indicative of the shifting industry alliances as all the major hardware manufacturers and operating-system suppliers prepare for the transition to the object-oriented applications environments of the future (see time line).
"The whole industry is jockeying for position in this space because all the money to be made in developing software in the future is at stake," said Chris Stone, CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG), a standards organization.
Under the Common Object Model (COM) protocol, applications supporting Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) architecture will communicate and collaborate with applications using Digital's Object-Broker implementation of OMG's CORBA standard.
Beyond the technical import of the announcement, Microsoft and Digital are trying to encourage software vendors to develop their products on Windows NT today in preparation for a future migration to Cairo, the object-oriented version of NT, according to Stone.
"We expect all users to migrate to object-oriented operating systems over the years, though the vast majority will continue using procedural-based Windows until their machines are upgraded," said Mark Ryland, senior program manager in Microsoft's Cairo group.
This strategy resembles NeXT's tactic of encouraging developers to bet on NEXTSTEP in anticipation of a future migration to OpenStep. In both cases, companies are trying to highlight an advantage in both time to market and the number of potential desktops for their object-oriented operating systems.
COM is primarily related to objects distributed over a network, not the higher-level application environment addressed by OpenStep. Instead, the proposed standard competes most directly with Sun's Distributed Objects Everywhere model, as well as NeXT's Portable Distributed Object system. So far, OMG has received 13 proposals for what will ultimately emerge as the CORBA 2 distributed-object standard.
"What we are seeing is that Microsoft is coming into the fold of object systems based on OMG standards," said Bud Tribble, vice-president of object products for SunSoft in Mountain View, California. "That's due to the fact that some level of commonality is going to be necessary to actually create an objectware industry as we go forward in this decade."
The announcement suggests that Digital, which already offers Windows compatibility throughout its product line as an option, may now embrace Microsoft's Cairo operating system and Windows interface as its preferred standard for object-oriented operating systems.
Ryland denied that the COM announcement was rushed to respond to OpenStep. "There's no relation. We picked the date a month or two before."
NEXTSTEP for PA-RISC ships
Beta of Microsoft Cairo
Solaris with OpenStep ships
Microsoft Cairo ships
Taligent operating system ships
This time line is based on public statements about future product deliveries from the companies involved.