Still struck with the idea of a proprietary on-line service, Microsoft Corp has enlisted the help of CompuServe Inc to battle its belittled presence in the Internet browser market. CompuServe’s alliance with Microsoft will see the on-line service operator becoming the first outsider to use the latter’s Normandy Internet and on-line software technology – essentially the software the company has developed to turn the Microsoft Network into a site on the Web. Another way of looking at it is that Microsoft is reselling technologies used to build its eponymous Network to other service providers and that Compuserve is just the first customer. Last month, CompuServe announced its Red Dog initiative, designed to replace its proprietary architecture with one based on Internet standards. Bob Massey, chief executive of CompuServe, described Normandy as a major step in the initiative. Users will see the initial impact of Normandy in autumn, with the majority of the work completed by the year end, he said. CompuServe is acting as something of a beta tester, and is being given the source code, as well as early access to the package. One deal CompuServe gets is its own hot button alongside America Online Inc on the Windows95 desktop and its new family- oriented Wow! service will be available through another Windows95 icon.
Redmond campus
Microsoft has just previewed the stuff to various network operators, cable companies and Internet service providers at its Redmond campus, but Normandy is not scheduled to be broadly available to Internet service providers until the fourth quarter. However a special preview program will be running from August. The loose bundle of code comprises eight components of which Mail, News and Chat are fairly self-explanatory. There is also a Security Component based on Microsoft’s recently announced Internet Security Framework; an Information Retrieval Component provides an indexing and search engine; a White Pages Component handles user directories across multiple servers and the Personalization Component enables Internet service providers to create dynamic, customized content for individual users, based on ActiveX. But the heaviest component and the one that Internet service providers will be mosteager to get their hands on (apart from security) appears to be the Replication Component designed to replicate multiple Gigabytes of content across multiple remote servers. This forms the guts of the scalable on- line service and is transaction-based, able to carry out selective updates or roll back to a previous version of the content if a problem is encountered. Normandy is being sold by Microsoft’s desktop products and Internet customer unit and kept quite separate from the Microsoft Network operation, according to Bill Gates, who claims that Microsoft’s own network will be a customer for the technology, like any other. As for content providers – well, they will be able to use whichever Internet authoring tools they currently favour. This presents Compuserve with the classic open systems dilemma: on the one hand lies a substantial reduction in system development costs, on the other it is removing a substantial lock-in which may have kept information suppliers loyal. Neither side would comment on the price Compuserve is paying. Bill Gates said only that it wasn’t a huge amount. Pricing for Normandy will generally be negotiated individually, though some components may be shrink-wrapped. Normandy will be available in September. It supports Internet electronic mail and retrieval of data from the Web and opens access to Internet newsgroups. The second part of the announcement? CompuServe and sister WOW service are getting their very own button in the Windows95 on-line services. The updated desktop should begin shipping this summer in the OSR2 release of Windows95. CompuServe’s next Navigator release will also include Microsoft ‘s Internet Explorer: Gates said that that just about wraps it up for new buttons.
