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Microsoft To Extend RSS
Joshua53077 writes "Microsoft announced today a plan to 'extend the RSS standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information...' This feature will be included in Longhorn. It appears as though they will be including RSS support in Internet Explorer, which will come over a year and a half after the same technology was introduced in Apple's Safari RSS." From the article: "Gary Schare, director of strategic product management in the Windows division of Microsoft, says that while RSS is a reliable standard for updating information in message form, it currently has no logical way to organize that information in a way that could help subscribers keep track of what is being fed to them."
Several posts above are right, Microsoft's MO is to take a simple, special purpose protocol and expand it into a giant, world spanning, fingers in everything creature that, while usually not exactly a bad idea, is not at all what it was originally, and in all probablility will only work with .NET.
Why do they do this? Because, as many others have pointed out before me, they have, by simple necessity become a company that follows rather than defines the direction of technology.
RSS has a lot going for it in the MS world view.
1. It's a lightweight, simple, open protocol, so their engineers can get their heads around it easily. This isnt a slight to MS engineers - simply a statement that it has few elements and few dependencies to cause problems. As a double bonus, that means they can play the 'I'm sorry our content doesnt work with your reader, we have "matured the standard" and you haven't kept up.' card
2. It has traction in the market place. It's a popular standard that is imperfectly implemented, and imperfectly understood by most people.
3. It's sexy right now. Everybody is scrambling to support it, so MS looks good for saying "We're going to do more than support it, we're going to make it 'Better'". For the vast majority of people who still think MS is a giant because they make a great product, that sounds like "Don't Panic, everyone. Microsoft is on the case, and soon you mere mortals will be able to use an RSS Aggregator too.."
I'm more than a little scared to see what they do to RSS, but understand that they are like this because they have to be. Their borg-like pattern of integrating everything into one amorhpous, interconnected mass has put them in an unenviable position on more than just security issues.
Any direction they try to innovate in becomes competition for Windows or Office which they cannot cannibalize and survive. But they also can't cease to appear to innovate because they are trying to maintain the 'Microsoft Mentality' among non technical business and world leadership. So their only choice is to seize on the innovations of others, bastardize them and hope that nobody important realizes that they haven't done anything new in years.
In the mean time, I will hope that whatever changes they make to the standard will not make it into yet another vector for malware distribution.