Eliot,

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to the draft DCE DialTone proposal.

At 3M we have seen the role of DCE shift from an application environment to a provider of core infrastructure services. Although we do have transactional applications as you portray in the proposal, they are by no means the only or primary use of DCE in our enterprise. To position DCE as an application environment for transaction processing omits several vital application areas for us - global file sharing (e.g. DFS), Internet-enabled applications (secure IP tunnelling through rpc), and a general purpose secure transport for asynchronous messaging applications and distributed objects.

I fear that an exclusive focus on synchronous trpc-based applications will limit the future usefulness of DCE technology to 3M.

I'd be happy to discuss further, again thanks for the chance to comment