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Another Belated Microsoft Memo

Posted by Zonk on from the better-late-than-never dept.

fiannaFailMan writes "Bill Gates has sent out another memo heralding the latest big development in the industry, as he sees it. This time it's web-based software using technology such as AJAX (that MS 'invented but failed to exploit'). The Economist says 'As in previous cases, what is new is not the idea itself, but the fact that Microsoft is taking it seriously.' Zach Nelson of NetSuite decided against writing a memo. 'Writing memos is cheap,' he says, whereas 'writing software is a whole lot harder.'"

2 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Microsoft invented AJAX? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, get it right. XmlHttpRequest was implemented as a standard long after, and only because of, Microsoft's ActiveX implementation, which has been around since IE4. Before that, Microsoft had a Remote Scripting library for ASP, which allows the same functionality as "AJAX". The Remote Scripting library even worked in Netscape 4, which was a common browser at the time I built my first "AJAX" application.

    Do you know what "AJAX" is? It's a term coined by some overpaid design guru talking head to describe technology that has been around, and in heavy use by non-public webapps, for many years.

    Microsoft pioneered this whole way of thinking, even if they didn't implement it very creatively on many of their sites, and many of their better ideas (CSS expressions & behaviors, XML data islands) have still not become standards, while others have.

    And, yes, I am posting this from Firefox, running on an Ubuntu distro. I am not a Microsoft apologist, but mindlessly parrotting off commonly-believed falsehoods just pisses me off. When IE 5 was first released, it was a groundbreaking app, better than anything else on the market, and many of its innovative features are still unknown to most of the A-List, blogorati circle-jerk web-brochure designers who think making a glorified to-do list is "changing the face of the web".

  2. Re:Who owns it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    As the author of the "VirtualDub" video editor described it:
    Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media Group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. I have asked for the specific patent numbers, since I find patenting a file format a bit strange. At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation.