| One sure sign of the significance of Active Server Pages is that it is often confused with Internet Information Server 3.0. That is, many people think that they are synonymous. In reality, ASP is a single ISAPI filter that has been added to IIS 3.0. In almost everyone's mind, however, ASP has evidently supplanted the Microsoft Web server.
The second sign of the significance of ASP is much more subtle, and far more profound. The purpose of this book is to bring this level of significance into the open. In a word, ASP is the key to understanding everything else Microsoft is doing.
For years, many people have assumed that Gates' famous phrase, "Information at Your Fingertips" was merely the sanitized propaganda of a Redmond software hegemony. In this interpretation, the "information" at your fingertips was a function of the Microsoft application you were using. The implication was that the more Microsoft products you used, the more information would be at your fingertips. This interpretation was reinforced by another (earlier) war cry, "A PC on every desktop, all running Microsoft programs."
With ASP, a new interpretation of Microsoft strategy is now possible. This interpretation is not grounded in speculation, but in direct experience. Each one of us can experience this new interpretation for ourselves when we first use an ASP application that uses ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), for ADO is based on a technology that is based on a premise that has far reaching implications for society. The technology is OLEDB, and the premise is "universal access, not universal storage." |
