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Another Belated Microsoft Memo
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.'"
So does Microsoft have a patent on AJAX? Can they leverage their parenting of the technology to stifle progress once again? Who owns AJAX?
Surprisingly the bar is raising up to a point where web developers may have to think like software developers.
Thats the scary part...
Gregor
I encounter the same problem. There is so much out there that it can be frustrating for a web developer.
Personally I felt that age of simple web pages slipped away when javascript started becoming popular.
Now to be a web developer its gotten to the point that its difficult to know fewer than 3-4 languages. And its nearly on par with desktop development; but soon will be the day when desktop and internet will be seamless.
But I've implemented a few shiny upgrades to older web apps that we run, and people love 'em, and want AJAX in everything. There are a few applications that we maintain that make significant use of JavaScript, and people want to 'upgrade' the JS to AJAX. I've explained over and over again that AJAX is just a particular thing that you can do with JS, it's not something that you replace JS with.
AJAX is a really cool development method, but it's like any other tool--there are certain situations where it helps, and others where you just don't need it.
Just imagine how powerful and profitable Microsoft would be if they weren't always five years late to the party.
Just imagine how...status quo or diminished...Microsoft would be if they weren't intentionally five years late to the party. Seriously.
5 or 6 years ago Microsoft was hugely pushing a lot of very advanced web technologies, including remote scripting, behaviours, client-side XML data islands and heavily programmatically controllable transformations, and even the much-maligned ActiveX. These enabled some remarkable web applications (ActiveX, for instance, allowed you to have auto-updating rich client on the desktop, but retaining all of the advantages of the document model of HTML).
It really was a fantastic platform that they created, and they were light years ahead of everyone else. Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites, but for internal teams that were up on their chops (most aren't, unfortunately), there were some amazing solutions created.
However Microsoft has a so-called-problem that shops like Salesforce don't - they are pulling in billions upon billions a year from their, err, "legacy" products, and often they're their own biggest competitor. The last thing they want to do is pull the carpet out from under their cash cows and enter into a new competition as a new entrant of sorts, eliminating a huge source of income, and a competitive advantage. It's for this reason that the IE team was disbanded years ago, after they shot far ahead of everyone else.
The revisionist history where people imagine that Microsoft is behind because they're just not as advanced as their competitors really is laughable. Microsoft was a mile ahead and then decided they really wanted to run the 20K instead of the 100m.
But with this web-based/AJAX thingies it is a bit a conflict of interest for Microsoft. MS desperately tries to jump onto the services band-wagon. But the truth is that their main revenue comes from shrink-wrapped software (like Windows or Office). They *try* to laverage that to other areas but they fail miserably.
Take MS vs. Google. Now Google still IMHO does everything before MS, and then MS goes "me too" and issues something similar but yet worse than Google offering. In normal situation - meaning MS has no money to pump from OS/software revenue into new markets they would not get a chance against Google - they will simply bankrupt. Right now they pump the money but I doubt they get any revenue (even to go on zero line) from their web services.
Now as far as I understand they wan't to couple web-based software (more like service) with shrink-wrappedsoftware like Windows and Office. I base that on various interviews with MS execs about MS product line I've read. But this is like flawed idea from the begining. The most valuable part (IMHO) about web software is that it only needs a browser and server infrastructure on the other end. So in fact you do not need to pay any special attention to the client side (as you would have to with shrink-wrapped software). So for e.g. you could have a big extranet with 5000 clients across the world, using one sophisticated application by web and only thing you need is decent server architecture and on client side - commodity: standard browser running on any OS, maybe a printer or smth. to get the job done.
This is completely the opposite of having fat clients loaded with bloated OS and software suites - the MS way.
So I see a conflict here.
Soon, EVERY web app will need to be an AJAX app...even if it doesn't need to be.
As a user who has had to endure every application being a web application, even if it never needed to be, you're not going to get my sympathy. You're part of the group that created this problem.
I've got no problem with distributed applications, but the idea that everything should be HTML/CSS/Javascript sitting in front of a database is just wrong.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Er, "behind" and "less advanced" are synonymous.
If anything that's backwards. Microsoft sprinted to get halfway decent Javascript and XML support, and then decided they'd won the race and stopped dead. There hasn't been an Internet Explorer rendering engine update for over four years now.
Meanwhile, Gecko/Presto/KHTML have made steady progress and had the majority of the capabilities of what will be in Internet Explorer 7 years ago. Microsoft have acted like the hare racing against the tortoise - arrogant enough not to take the competition seriously, and have been overtaken while they weren't looking.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
What was a nice thing for solving problems otherwise difficult to solve, has turned into something that is making my expensive computer grind to a halt. Currently no browser likes to have multiple commercial pages open at the same time (which is how I often browse). Everybody from the content hoster, the ad folks, the editorial, and design folks gotta have some Ajax running. VERY VERY little does anything useful from either a UI or Content view, but in the end makes browsing slower, makes my computer slower, and makes me hate the F77ck3rs who think Ajax is cool. I hope this comes to a quick near death like when Java was cool.
Java applets have all the user interface/networking capabilities that AJAX has and some more.
I think that Sun missed the boat on this one. Instead of working on a lightweight JVM for every platform, they kept bloating the language and the implementation. I don't see many Java applets anymore, it's mostly Flash and now AJAX.
Microsoft's patents on the C#/.NET APIs have already greatly stifled progress. If Microsoft didn't have those patents, Mono would likely be far more widely used on Linux. It has taken a lot of work to determine that those patents are likely not relevant or enforceable, and nevertheless they still have a bad PR effect for Mono.
In general, merely having a patent stifles progress and is an anti-competitive practice because it forces competitors to work around it, in particular given that Microsoft has threatened to enforce its portfolio and clearly has the means to do it.
Microsoft also uses its patent portfolio to negotiate patent cross licensing agreements and they use patents in the negotiation of individual business deals. And Microsoft uses patents to threaten countersuits when they are threatened with a legitimate patent lawsuit, usually resulting in a cross licensing deal and settlement.