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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The HailStorm program will put all your data in one convenient place -- and leave Bill Gates with the keys.
Mar 28, 2001 | Once upon a time there was a Control Room. At least that's what I remember it being called. I was a high school student in the 1970s, learning some basic computer skills on Teletypes connected to minicomputers at a local university. As long as you were just working at your station, you were fine; no one bothered you. But if you sent output to what was then quaintly known as the line printer, you had to pick up your sheaves of green and white paper in a bin at the Control Room -- a back office where guys with beards puttered around and tended to hulking tape drives. Trouble was, more often than not the job never made it to the line printer, or the paper ran out or jammed, or some other random glitch intervened. If you tried to get help from the Control Room guys they'd just mutter something and ignore you -- they had better things to do.
Within a few years the advent of the desktop computer meant those guys were on their way out. Personal computing was a fine thing in its own right -- but I've always thought that it won a lot of converts among people who'd just had enough of the Control Room guys and wanted a little revenge.
Well, the Control Room is back -- in the guise of Microsoft's new HailStorm initiative.
In case you haven't yet read about it, you may need a brief explanation of HailStorm. If you have read about it, you definitely need an explanation, because this is surely one of the murkiest product announcements in history.
If you dig through the mountains of buzzwords in Microsoft's HailStorm "white paper," you eventually discover that HailStorm is Microsoft's effort to make computing more convenient by allowing you to A) collect all your personal information in one format intelligible across many platforms and devices, and B) store all that information with -- who else? -- Microsoft. For a fee, of course.
Somehow, Microsoft -- which, after all, is uniquely identified with the triumph of personal computing over the old-fashioned, centralized mainframe -- has turned its back on its own history. The financial analysts have long been telling the company that it has to move away from selling software and begin selling services, and HailStorm is an answer to that -- but it's a peculiarly retrograde one.
The HailStorm launch propaganda is full of rhetoric about empowering users ("HailStorm Puts You in Control") to protect their own data. "People are frustrated and confused," the white paper declares. "Sometimes it seems that every program, every Web site, every device has its own set of rules ... People are not in control of the technology that surrounds them. We have important data and personal information scattered in hundreds of places across the technology landscape, locked away in applications, product registration databases, cookies, and Web site user tracking databases."
Well, the last sentence is accurate. And while that situation may sometimes be inconvenient, it is also reassuring. Many of us worry less about having to learn a new set of rules every now and then than about the forbidding prospect of somebody assembling all that "important data and personal information" into one cross-referenced master profile. For instance, the database in which our prescription drugs are registered should be separate from the one in which our other purchases may be stored. Cookies spook some people, but at least they're always stored on your own computer, leaving you with the "control" to delete them.
HailStorm purports to give us more control. But there is no escaping the simple fact that Microsoft is asking us all to move our data from its current home on our desktops into a paid service on a server inside a Microsoft data center -- Bill Gates' Control Room.
