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InterOffice Memo
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| bet | 25/27 | | Sana | 19.03.2017 | | Hajmi | 3.19 Mb. | | #225 |
Potential Risks
Wile pursuing even the most conservative opportunities which I present in this memo, these efforts are not entirely without risk. Here I identify some of the potential hazards we can expect to encounter.
Microsoft/Internet Culture Clash
One of the biggest challenges facing Microsoft’s success in the Internet community is acceptance and respect. Although we have an incredible amount of respect in the commercial software business, the Internet has been founded on public domain protocols and products which generally included source availability at no charge. It has been only recently that vendors have suggested profiting from the Internet by selling the browsing tools and technologies, and offering commercial services on the Internet itself. The information and software has been free for 15 years, we need to be careful to embrace the current technologies and community before we attempt to reshape it.
Development/Testing - Interoperability Issues
We need to be very sensitive to the fact that many of the protocol “specifications” for these Internet tools were written after the tools themselves. The development of the Windows NT FTP server experience illustrated this point too effectively. Although we were able to develop a working server in 2 man-months, over 3 months of concerted interoperability testing were necessary in order to account for all of the interpretations made by the authors of the several dozen FTP clients. This process was accelerated greatly by putting the server online and having 1,000s of users test it for us by connecting, however the lack of history and involvement in the Internet community made this effort more difficult. Server testing is nice, because end-users can do it for us. Client-side testing poses new challenges. Without an extensive beta cycle, it will be difficult to ensure full interoperability of Internet clients with existing server implementations. My recommendation to ship Internet clients with the Resource Kit(s) in the initial stage and hold off putting them in the product allows us to guarantee they are rock-solid interoperable and supportable.
Support
Internet support provides a number of challenges and an incredible number of variables. Imagine a Chicago customer using a third party TCP/IP product, a public domain gopher client, dialing in via an ISDN provider and not being able to connect to their University gopher server. They will call us and ask whose problem it is and how to resolve it. By providing high-quality, interoperable solutions in-the-box we can eliminate a number of these variables. However, we need to establish a plan to support these customer situations effectively, perhaps exclusively through the Internet on public forums. This is another argument for offering well-tested, interoperable clients in the resource kits before integrating them into the core product.
Address Space/Routing Table Explosion
The Internet was never intended to grow to the size that it has. The designers of the original TCP/IP protocols did not take into account all of the scalability issues. As such the Internet is facing some scaling problems that need to be addressed. The short story is, the Internet backbone routers are being forced to maintain 30 new routing entries a day as new networks join the party. With 16,000 networks to route between and 30 new networks a day joining in, efficient routing is becoming more and more difficult for the Internet routers that bind the Internet. Further, the original addressing scheme and assignment policy was very lax, leading to very poor utilization of the 32-bit IP address space. Current predictions estimate the life expectancy (given current growth rates) of the Internet address space to be ~5 years. If the growth curve takes another dramatic upswing, this has the potential to become problematic in less time. Several engineering groups within the IETF have been chartered to design solutions to this pressing problem which are referred to as IPng, or Internet Protocol, next generation. The IETF has organized a 17 member board to provide guidance in this area to which I was appointed. This gives Microsoft an opportunity to protect our corporate interests by steering the proposals to consider requirements of longer-term developments that we’d like to explore. Some are of the opinion that the Internet will just blow up, that the IETF cannot solve this problem and that NII will be far enough along to eclipse the Internet altogether. I do not share this belief; I think that the Internet will become a leaf network and the primary source of information for the initial phases of the NII, eventually it will be overhauled, but it’s the only universal game in town today.
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