07.01.09

Proprietary Software Falters

Posted in Database, Europe, FOSS, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Open XML, Windows at 4:34 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft demonstrates that non-Free software is simply incapable of handling mission-critical tasks like GNU/Linux does (in Wall Street for example)

BACKED by roughly 20 references, we have already written quite extensively about the recurring issues at the LSE (the stock market, not the school). It is considered to be Microsoft’s poster child that they brag about in commercials all over their Web site. By some people’s assessment, this is considered the case study for Microsoft, never mind the excessive redundancy (cost) and poor track record.

Well, guess what?

The LSE is calling it quits and dumping the platform.

What an unbelievable PR disaster. IDG has the details:

London Stock Exchange reportedly to dump £40m platform

[...]

Dropping TradElect would be a dramatic about-face for the exchange, which had heavily promoted its ability to rival newer, dedicated electronic exchanges, and plumbed millions of pounds into doing so. It runs on HP ProLiant Servers and Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000 systems, and within a Cisco network architecture.

How will Microsoft respond to this PR gaffe, which was probably an expected blunder? Analogous systems running GNU/Linux are true success stories.

In a similar vein, now that the UK abandons this system, who can ever rely on proprietary formats like OOXML, for example? That too will be at risk if Glyn Moody gets his way. He is rallying for support at the moment.

Next week, I’m taking part in a debate with a Microsoft representative about the passage of the OOXML file format through the ISO process last year. Since said Microsoftie can draw on the not inconsiderable resources of his organisation to provide him with a little back-up, I thought I’d try to even the odds by putting out a call for help to the unmatched resource that is the Linux Journal community. Here’s the background to the meeting, and the kind of info I hope people might be able to provide.

Not surprisingly, the meeting is neither for my nor Microsoft’s benefit, but for that of Richard Steel, who is CIO of the London Borough of Newham. Those with good memories may recall that back in 2003 it looked like Newham was going to switch to open source, in what could have been a real breakthrough for free software in the UK, but that it then changed its mind and signed a long-term - and secret - deal with Microsoft. Winning Newham was so important to Microsoft that it helped set up a competitive trial…

The Newham situation is one that we wrote about in:

Indeed, it is rather ugly. Newham’s people are hopefully paying attention to the significant news from LSE. It is also in London. █

Rating: 9.3/10 (13 votes cast)

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06.30.09

Microsoft’s Dublin DC Could be Indicative of the Notorious Tax Evasion Conspiracy

Posted in Deception, Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Search at 4:02 am by Roy Schestowitz

Saint Patrick

Summary: Ireland receives another favour for offering a tax haven to Microsoft?

LAST WEEK we wrote about how Microsoft rewards its tax haven, which is Ireland. This tax evasion in Ireland is a subject that we covered a long time ago and Microsoft’s special relationship with Ireland is only to be expected. Microsoft uses Irish commissioners to push for software patents into Europe, for example [1, 2, 3, 4]. Additionally, Microsoft hires more people in Ireland despite the fact that the company's global workforce shrinks rapidly. Now it is building a whole datacentre in Dublin.

Microsoft’s Dublin facility on the 19-acre site in Grange Castle Business Park currently has about 303,000 square feet of data center floor, with 5.4 MW of power supplied to it. Its power supply will be expandable up to 22.2 MW, as the facility scales up.

Microsoft is said to have pulled similar tricks in Norway, namely rewarding Norway with a datacentre after the country had made a mockery of the OOXML vote. █

Rating: 8.8/10 (8 votes cast)

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06.25.09

Microsoft on “Embrace and Extend”, the “Windows API Franchise”

Posted in FUD, Java, Microsoft, Mono, Open XML, OpenDocument, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 12:39 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Old lessons about Microsoft’s intentional sabotage through “embrace and extend”; use of the Windows API with software patents (like Mono’s problem)

T

ODAY’S INTERESTING exhibit arrives after a lot of work on the Wiki. We have hundreds more coming. We will summarise key observations drawn from Exhibit plex_5906 (1997) [PDF], which contains an E-mail from Aaron Contorer to Bill Gates. The full exhibit is available as plain text at the bottom, but here are the bits worth paying attention to, as well as corresponding background.

We start with the realisation — as Microsoft confesses to it — that Windows is at great risk.

Today we face the largest threat Microsoft has faced since the success of Windows For the first time, there is a really credible threat to our position as the leading platform for ISVs to write to.

Fear of Java comes into play:

There are three possible ways to address the threat of the Java platform. One is to do nothing and gradually die as others innovate around us. The second is to join the parade of people who are saying “let’s kill Microsoft and share their market among us” - good for everyone else, but reducing us to the much smaller role of a common software company like Lotus or Borland or even Symantec. Thats a great way to make all our stock options worth zero, even If we would not technically be out of business. The third choice is to make major innovations to our platform so people still prefer to write to us instead of some tepid cross-platform Java layer. This is our only real option.

We have already revealed the gory details about Microsoft’s attack on NetPC (sometimes referred to as “NC”). The Gartner Group helped Microsoft's attack, as always. Here is some more information from Microsoft:

Our competitors are not stupid, so they are pushing the Java platform as the solution for programs that really need to run closer to the user. Sure, its a half-assed solution and isn’t compatible with anything and in fact scarcely exists, but hey, at least it’s not Windows. With Oracle and HTML-generating code on the server and a browser with Java on the client, you have a very crude, complicated, but functional platform for developing line-of-business applications more specifically distributed applications which take advantage of all the interactivity and media-richness that purely centralized mainframe apps never had

Microsoft is then defining “Embrace and Extend”:

In economics there is a well-understood concept called switching costs - how much it costs for a trading partner to change partners. Our philosophy on switching costs is very clear: we want low switching costs for customers who want to start using our platform, and we want to provide so much unique value that there are in effect high costs of deciding to move to a different platform. There is a name for this: it is called Embrace and Extend.

Embrace means we are compatible with what’s out there, so you can switch to our platform without a lot of obstacles and rework. You can switch from someone else’s Java compiler to ours; from someone else’s Web server to ours; etc. Customers love when we do this (as long as we don’t spend our energy embracing extra standards no one really cares about); our competitors are not so sure they like It because they prefer us to screw up.

Extend means we provide tremendous value that nobody else does, so (A) you really want to switch to our software, and (B) once you try our software you would never want to go back to some inferior junk from our competitors. Customers usually like when we do this, since by definition it’s only an extension if it adds value. Competitors hate when we do this, because by adding new value we make our products much harder to clone - this is the difference between innovation and just being a commodity like corn where suppliers compete on price alone. Nobody builds or sustains a business as successful as Microsoft by producing trivial products that are easy to clone - that would be a strategy for failure.

If we fail to embrace, we can lose because there are big barriers to buying our products. But if we Fail to extend, or do only humble work that is easy to clone or to surpass, we automatically lose because our competitors will spend literally billions of dollars to clone our work and replace us.

With that in sight, think about MSODF and how Microsoft broke interoperability in other malicious ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

The “Windows API” is then described as “Embrace and Extend” against NC specifically:

Windows was a very successful embrace-and-extend move. People already had DOS machines and DOS apps, and we were able to go in and say “add this to your machine and it wLll just get better.” Wow! What a deal! It seems to have worked out all right so far. NT is a very similar move; although It’s not trivial to upgrade from Win95 to NT. in general you can use the same computer, same apps. and same APIs as before, plus more.

The really big win in Windows is the API. An app that calls the Windows API is effectively calling upon thousands of person-years of engineering work to help their app get its job done in a very specific way. You could argue !hat the API is too hard to use, that not every library is as fast as it should be, or other serious imperfections, but the fact remains: if you took away Windows, that apphcation would no longer work.

The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cast to using a different operating system Instead. You can’t just take a Windows app and stick it on some weird Java NC from Oracle, for example, and expect it to work - the guts just are not there. For many customers, the cast of reworking all their apps would be huge.

Watch this:

In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.

Think about the role of Mono and why it helps Microsoft. Remember that this whole memo is about fighting Sun’s NC and Java, which is cross-platform. Oracle, which now owns/buys Sun, was part of this programme at the time.

Watch how Microsoft intends to use software patents to shield its territory (it is just as though Mono is history repeating itself):

We are doing all of this. We are fixing TCO and further improving our dev tools. We are providing new value such as Viper and great multimedia and unified storage. We are making sure that Windows, not some new platform, is the most attractive place to run apps written in this now programming language. We are building the best virtual machine in the world, and optimizing it to run on Windows. We are even making sure you can run your Windows apps remotely on an NT server if all you have on your desk is a GUI terminal. As if all this work were not already hard to copy, we are also getting a bunch of patents to further protect It against cloning.

On the role of ActiveX and DirectX in merely preventing platforms from becoming a commodity, to use Bill Gates' explanation:

Let me be dear we have no problem with the Java language or with running Java apps really really well on our platform. But we are explicitly not in the business of making it easy for people to write apps that get all the features of Windows on a non-Windows platform. “Pure cross-platform portability” is another way of saying “commoditize the OS.” In this vision, every OS is just an engine for running this layer called Java as fast as possible, and adding any value below the Java layer Is explicitly against the rules.

Sun has already figured this out and has launched its 100% pure Java” marketing program, which literally certifies apps as running the same on any client OS. Programs that call a Windows API or use ActiveX or DirectX, or any platform-specific feature, are by definition not 100% Pure Java, and are therefore evil. Hey, If you were Sun, you would say this too!

As usual, there is a lot to be learned from this. Although it is over a decade old, this was not seen before in the public arena, just in courts for the most part. Microsoft settled to keep it away from the public eye. █

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

– George Santayana

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit plex_5906, as text

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Rating: 8.9/10 (8 votes cast)

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Bill Gates: “We Should Look at Even Patenting the Things That We Do Add to Help Office”

Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Patents at 3:57 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Bill Gates wants not only to make IE ‘extend’ HTML but also to patent Office features that do so

For a little bit of essential background, see what was shown in:

Today we look at Exhibit PX06508 (1998) [PDF], which was probably made famous by the following text it contains:

From: Bill Gates
Sent:. Saturday, December 05, 1998 12:4,t PM
To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
Cc: Paul Maritz
Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on
PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory Windows,

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

It basically shows that Chairman Gates wanted to ‘extend’ the Web with proprietary Microsoft bits, but it actually gets worse. In the same exhibit we find intent to use software patents to limit interoperability/compatibility:

Its right for business reasons because it supports competitive browsers but with a clear benefit for people who use our browser (particularly IE 5),

What I trying to say is that looking forward we should not do heroic things like add new capabilities to the standards to help Office.

We should look at even patenting the things that we do add to help Office.

I need to lean more about this whole DAV thing.

The reply from Steve Sinofsky starts with an admission that Microsoft has proprietary protocols:

I personally think this is an area that has been oversold as a benefit and in terms of interoperability. In essence, this is a proprietary protocol for us anyway since we are re-building MAPI on top of It.

The words “open” and “standard” are thrown out there yet again:

For me, DAV is a case where Microsoft is out there leading with the newly proposed (by Microsoft) but yet to be implemented “open” standard. In contrast, HTML is a case where we are dealing with an installed base and standard that already existed and our conflicts are how to work within that environment.

Another interesting bit says that proprietary IE ‘extensions’ are “are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.”

For all practical purposes, Office 2000 requires Windows and IE. We started the project trying to be great on all browsers, and even greater on lnternet Explorer (from our vision and presentation we did for you), but the momentum inside the company essentially prevents that message from making it through development. Only the most basic rendering works in other browsers-IE is required for:

* PowerPoint (the default output is IE only, and that is essentially IE5)
* Access Data Pages (IE5)
* Web Components (IE5)
* Reasonable performance in Excel (due to big tables and the IE5 support for a predefined table width)
* Word and PowerPoint output tons of stuff that only looks good in IE due to the shared line layout code and bugs in other browsers implementation of CS(which is essentially an IE-specific feature)
* HTML email essentially requires Outlook Express or Outlook
* Vector Graphics (VML which renders using vectors rather than GIFs) requires IE

to name a few. I think these are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.

There is also clear realisation that people loathe this:

If Office documents only render in IE then there is zero chance that anyone will be able to use Office to create documents that will be shared outside an environment with the standardized Window browsers (intranet perhaps, but only perhaps given the time to migrate and the minority of Win 3.1, etc.). Personally I put pictures of a trip out on sinofsky.com that were made with PowerPoint 2000 and got a dozen messages from fdends and family (including a webtv person) saying they could not see the pictures. Everything I’ve posted here at the business school has been “recalled” by me because students were not able to read it (all sorts of combinations of OS/browsers).

No area of the product has received more skepticism and push back than our HTML output-from reviewers, analysts, and beta customers. The other night I attended a 500 person Office 2000 event in Boston (the Team Web Tour”). The whole presentation was in IE and every time the browser was shown hands went up to ask “what about non-IE browsers?”. Finally the demonstration showed powerpoint 2000 in IE which is *awesome* output–then showed the non-IE output and it was just ugly (didn’t scale, fixed size slides, no slide show view, no DHTML, etc.). I thought the audience was either going to get up and walk out in disgust or rush the stage in protest.

All in all, what any person can learn from this 9-year-old antitrust exhibit is that orders come from the very top to add proprietary extensions to Internet Explorer and shield them even further with software patents. Microsoft knows that people would not like this, but being anti-competitive, this may seem like a priority. Had it been just about improvement, then patents would probably not be needed and the issue of breaking interoperability remains.

For people whose work is affected by the ODF/OOXML situation it is an important lesson to always bear in mind. █

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit PX06508, as text

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Rating: 7.0/10 (12 votes cast)

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06.21.09

BSI: Got Microsoft

Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 6:48 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Got Microsoft

Summary: The BSI’s new link to Microsoft is Datawatch, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner

GROKLAW has caught this very interesting press release. It says:

Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and BI, today announced the appointment of its Senior Product Manager, Gareth Horton, to the British Standards Institution (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41. As a co-opted expert member of the committee, he has also been nominated to the Working Group (WG4) of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, which is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of IS29500 (Office Open XML).

Pamela Jones adds: “Co-opted precisely how?”

For those who are new to the scandals of the BSI, see:

To add icing to this little cake, almost exactly a year ago Datawatch announced that it continued to “Cement Partnership with Microsoft.”.

Chelmsford, Mass.—June 25, 2008—Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and leading provider of solutions to the Enterprise Information Management market, announces several significant achievements and activities regarding its partnership with Microsoft.

Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. No conflict of interests there, eh? The BSI has been filled with such conflicts all along. What a fiasco. █

Rating: 10.0/10 (6 votes cast)

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06.20.09

More Microsoft AstroTurfing (aka ‘Technical Evangelism’) in Twitter

Posted in Deception, FUD, Marketing, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 10:31 am by Roy Schestowitz

“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”

–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Summary: Kirk Evans is given as an example of Microsoft guerrilla marketing in Twitter

“Microsoft stalkers,” called them our source, whose account was addressed by a Microsoft “Technical Evangelist”. That’s exactly the type of people whom James Plamondon was training in order to promote Microsoft very aggressively, to this very date.

Let’s step back just a bit and see the example we have at hand. Our source writes:

Having read Microsoft’s IE8: Get The Facts website I posted on our Twitter channel that I’d seen it and thought is was priceless FUD.

Within minutes I got a Microsoft employee following us on Twitter and requesting that Sirius e-mail him to discuss “discuss IE8 opptys” (whatever that means).

See http://twitter.com/kaevans

The MS person responsible is Kirk Evans, an architecture evangelist based in Texas. Note the wallpaper on his Twitter channel is a pile of horse shit.

I’m intrigued to say the least. What’s the horse shit all about? Why should an architecture evangelist care about us pointing out what 90% of the tech industry already knows? The question is, is he approaching every person who criticises this new IE: Get The Facts website?

His Twitter channel includes gems such as:

“Laughing at the slander against #IE8 and the #GetTheFacts site http://tinyurl.com/mj38ly all bile, no substance. Truth hurts.”

This is full on, aggressive technology evangelism/indoctrination where Microsoft ‘evangelists’ are employed to use Twitter et al to silence critics.

Whilst I’m quite keen to reply to him (just for the fun of it) I’m a little concerned that my ‘card will be marked’.

Microsoft does not deny using Twitter to do its PR, marketing, AstroTurfing, evangelism or whatever they wish to call it (many euphemisms exist and Orwellian language is a spinner’s best friend). We wrote about this type of activity from Microsoft at Twitter in:

Based on experience, those who routinely write about Microsoft products (i.e. mention the company’s name or product names) tend to sooner or later be followed or pinged somehow. Microsoft wants these people on its side. One of our readers, Goblin, has experimented to show this empirically. Some of the potential Microsoft bots/AstroTurfers appear to be mass-twitting the same promotional or provocative messages. They defame Microsoft’s competition and promote Microsoft for the most part.

This account is a good example, but shortly after I had complained about it for abuse (identical, abrasive messages sent to many strangers separately) it started saying “This person has protected their updates.”

Dodgy.

“Microsoft is connected to partners via Twitter and it uses PR agencies to do much/all this work.”As examples in the posts above show, I have had what seems like Microsoft bots following me (to be fair, other companies use similar tactics of re-Twitting messages about their products). The same goes for Microsoft managers like Oliver Bell, who apparently wants to keep an eye on what I write about OOXML, which is his area. He also speaks about Boycott Novell in person.

Microsoft is connected to partners via Twitter and it uses PR agencies to do much/all this work. That distances the dirty tactics from the company this way, leaving itself less sensitive to scrutiny.

Microsoft’s PR department (Waggener Edstrom) has already developed new tools to spy on Twits — to then respond to them appropriately. It’s not just a Twitter thing, but this in general is how Microsoft manages to identify damaging posts/articles and intercept them quickly, before people notice. A recent example would be a negative Surface review that they had removed very quickly by phoning the blogger.

Microsoft has always done such things (The Inquirer in particular dares to blow the whistle on censorship attempts and bribes), but with Twitter it is a lot more visible for people to see because the equivalent of E-mail is made public. The anti-ODF campaign from Microsoft is a good example where Twits said a mouthful about what the company has been doing. See the most recent examples in:

If people wish to see how aggressively –and that’s putting it gently — Microsoft competes, Twitter may be an entertaining read. With the intrusion of marketing scum like Pay2Tweet, the death of the platform’s inherent trust may be imminent. Twitter already declines in terms of traffic, like all other Web sites which get hijacked by marketing agents who seize an opportunity. █

Related:

Rating: 7.9/10 (13 votes cast)

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06.18.09

ODF Comes Before OOXML

Posted in Deception, FUD, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 2:48 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ODF gains further momentum and Microsoft’s smears against it gain momentum also

A new online validator (AGPL 3.0-licensed) has been built that supports ODF before it ever bothers with OOXML, which is proprietary and assciated with scandals.

The Office-o-tron will inspect a submitted office document and produce a validation report. It understands ODF for now (OOXML coming soon).

The preference or precedence of ODF says a lot.

“More recently we saw Microsoft folks engaging in some more Wikipedia subversion in the article on ODF.”Microsoft is meanwhile badmouthing ODF and fragmenting it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. In response to the accusations of a whisper campaign, Microsoft’s special friend (who makes money from Microsoft-related contracts) calls ODF “crappy”. It is important to remember where this man’s (Rick Jelliffe’s) money comes from because the Microsoft ecosystem is broad and self serving. Rob Weir responds by saying: “A bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. Rick Jelliffe denies disinformation campaign against ODF by telling more lies about ODF.”

That’s nice.

Rick Jelliffe was previously offered money by Microsoft to edit Wikipedia. More recently we saw Microsoft folks engaging in some more Wikipedia subversion in the article on ODF. See the following for details and examples:

This Microsoft-inspired intervention in Wikipedia most certainly continues. For example, one need only look at some of hAl's latest edits. One person writes: “Some anti-ODF trolling is in the air, but it will not succeed”

Another Microsoft-affiliated person (an MVP) is attending an ODF conference to cause trouble and disrupt, just as we warned. And indeed, he comes there just to heckle along with friends from Microsoft. That company is simply allergic to anything that facilitates freedom and fair competition. The business model is based on forcing people to use particular products (e.g. using bundling and lock-in) rather than offer something they actually want. Even longtime Windows users still try to reject Vista and get rid of the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office. █

Rating: 8.1/10 (14 votes cast)

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06.13.09

End of Microsoft Money Shows Why Free Software is Better and Standards Are Important

Posted in FOSS, Microsoft, Open XML, Standard at 2:17 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A lesson in lock-in, courtesy of Microsoft

A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft Money coming to an end (there are many punchlines which properly fit this rare item of news). Other interesting perspectives continue to appear after all that Microsoft PR (and damage control, mostly to do with migration of existing clients). TechDirt writes:

A great example of this is the failure of Microsoft Money. The company has now announced that it’s going to discontinue the product despite years of effort and millions of dollars spent to try to defeat Intuit’s Quicken product.

One particularly good article on the subject comes from Sam Varghese, who explains how this whole situation serves as a reminder that Free software can be one’s savior.

Open source takes no hostages

Have you ever had the experience of creating and storing data in a certain application, only to find that your dependency on a proprietary format means that you have lost all your data?

[...]

With a package like Money, new versions take into account the changing laws that govern small business and personal finances and the headache of managing money disappears.

But what about your data? Is Microsoft going to offer a package that can translate that data into something that could, perhaps, be used by a package like that put out by Intuit?

Unlikely, given that Microsoft once tried to buy Intuit and was only stopped by the US department of justice which “felt strongly that the proposed merger would lead to higher prices and less innovation in the personal finance software market.”

The article as a whole is recommended and so are the comments. Classic arguments about curation, portability, and long-term preservation neatly apply here. Just take OOXML for example. If Microsoft Office is discontinued a few years from now (let’s say due to unsuccessful migration to the Web), how will data encoded in OOXML be accessed 10 years from now? Or 50 years from now? OOXML is proprietary, it is poorly documented, and it contains binary blobs; no application other than Microsoft Office can handle Microsoft’s de facto implementation of something which is only close to ECMA OOXML but drifts further away from it as time goes by (not to mention the crime associated with OOXML). It is designed this way to tighten lock-in.

Free software has been around for ages. It can never be “discontinued” as long as determined users or developers are willing to hack on it. Free software does not depend on any one company for its existence and maintenance. Mozilla/Firefox, for example, outlived the demise of Netscape, using Gecko. █

“People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.”

–Richard Stallman

Rating: 8.0/10 (14 votes cast)

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