Microsoft Drops Quadrant

by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Aug 08, 2010 |

Mary Jo Foley reported last week that, Quadrant, yet another piece of Microsoft's Oslo was being dropped.

In 2007, Microsoft first discussed publicly its plans for “Oslo” — an amorphous multi-product effort that encompased future releases of .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server. By the fall of 2008, Microsoft had decoupled .Net, VIsual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server from Oslo. When officials said Oslo, they meant Microsoft’s evolving modeling strategy and technologies, specifically the M language, the Quadrant tool and the associated metadata repository.

In the summer of 2009, as part of one of Microsoft’s countless reorgs, the Oslo team was combined with Microsoft’s Data Programability team (which manages Astoria, Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity Framework (EF), XML, ADO.Net and tools/designers).

She explains:

Multiple contacts of mine are telling me that Microsoft has decided to shelve Quadrant and “refocus” M.

A Microsoft's spokesperson was quoted:

“We are still working on SQL Server Modeling and it remains an important part of our Data Platform strategy. Our current plans are to ship our modeling platform in a future release of SQL Server/Azure. Customers can download the latest CTP which we have updated to use the VS 2010 and .NET 4 to give us feedback.”

Douglas Purdy, CTO Data and Modeling in Microsoft’s Business Platform Division and Oslo's leader did not comment on the topic on his blog.

Ever since it's inception, the project endured major rescoping without ever emerging from a CTP status. With Microsoft presiding at the future of UML, the moderate success of the Software Factories, and the rapid growth of Eclipse as a strong Modeling platform, one can only wonder what strategy will Microsoft adopt in the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) space. What's your take on it? Where is the future of MDE? How can Microsoft participate in that future?

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Community comments

Expected by Colin Jack Posted

bad move, imho by Kostya K Posted

Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by Faisal Waris Posted

Re: Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by peter lin Posted

Re: Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by James Watson Posted

Expected by Colin Jack

Middle management, hype, reorganization, politics...together they seem to have created a situation where only a fool would get excited about any announcement of anything new from Microsoft. Personally I am more sad to see what they have done to IronRuby as it showed real promise, Oslo showed a little promise but it quickly turned out ot be nonsense.

bad move, imho by Kostya K

Sounds like Microsoft drops another innovative project while spending time on small pocket-size CASE-constructor projects like WebMatrix and LightSwitch probably oriented on housewives. Oslo was ambitious and hard to implement, though it could bring DSLs to masses.

Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by Faisal Waris

While we keep hearing that semantic web is "real soon now", I do believe that we are approaching a time when ontology based approaches will start to gain real traction.

Some recent indications are:

- Google purchase of Metabase
- IBM's 'Smart Plant' initiative
- Many emerging products around text mining and natural language processing

Re: Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by peter lin

if by real soon, you mean in another 15 years, then I would say yes. semantic web has been around for 10 years now with very little progress and tons of failures. Just look at all the semWeb startups that failed miserably. I like ontology approach and feel it's quite powerful. Done properly for a focused problem, it works well. What W3C is pitching as semantic web on the other hand is junk.

Re: Hope Microsofts Adopts an Ontology based Approach Instead by James Watson

Isn't the real problem with the semantic web that it requires everyone agree on the semantics? (so to speak)

Without a single (accepted) authority making that determination, you basically have to wait for a spontaneous mass adoption of a single standard (ala Facebook.) History has shown that this often means that the best option is not chosen.