IBM And Microsoft Have Dueling Visions For Software Modeling

This short article gets to the heart of the Oslo matter, which is Microsoft’s full court press initiative to provide modeling as a mechanism of building software and managing operations. I predict the most controversial part of Microsoft’s Oslo play will be in the modeling language itself, which will no doubt have little if anything to do with UML.

So, here we go again, right? YA industry standard ignored. Here’s my take: SO WHAT!? In fact, why not?

Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that "industry standards" are often propped up by other vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Sun, and a standard cast of others. How is this cabal behavior different than anti-trust behavior? Smells similar to me.

Further, Microsoft has a successful track record of usurping standards with richer functionality not afforded by standards. Anyone remember XML Islands in IE4? How about DHTML?

My Predictions About MSML (Microsoft Modeling Language (I made that up)):

1. It will be cool.
2. It will take until 2013 to become practical (v3).
3. It will spawn a whole new argument on standards compliance that will be as loud as TDD fights.
4. It will have awesome designers and rendering technologies for the models.
5. The ALT.Netters will hate it.
6. It will become ubiquitous, in ways UML never did.
7. UML will become cute. Like Lisp.
8. It will fail to raise the genuine focus of developers to the model and away from code. Like UML.

Flame away.