(January 11, 2002) - In an exclusive interview with the Web Services Journal News Desk, Microsoft group product manager Greg Leake is pulling no punches when he asserts his opposite number at IBM - in the interview we posted earlier - is "misinformed" and that IBM was "misrepresenting" the licensing costs applied by Microsoft when claiming that the client access licenses required for Windows 2000 Server drive up the cost for .NET as more users connect.

"IBM WebSphere 4.0 costs 15 times more than Microsoft .NET in the example analyzed," maintains Leake.

He also refutes the position taken in our interview by IBM's Stefan Van Overtveldt, program director, WebSphere Technical Marketing, that IBM is missing the point when using the Petstore.com application to make comparisons between J2EE and .NET.

On the contrary, says, Leake, "The Java Pet Store (Petstore.com) is held up by Sun Microsystems as a primary blueprint application for J2EE that illustrates 'best practice architecture' and 'best coding practices…for enterprise applications'… Furthermore, IBM appeared on stage with Sun and other J2EE vendors to endorse the Pet Store application at Java One in May 2001, and even demonstrated it running in WebSphere 4.0 in front of thousands of developers as a best practice enterprise application."

It is "very disingenuous," Leake insists, "for IBM to come out now and say it is a bad application and should not be used to compare with .NET."

"We are very happy to meet IBM, Oracle or other J2EE vendor in an independent shootout for verification of the performance results," concludes Leake.