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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.'"

5 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AJAX and Comet by gbrandt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Surprisingly the bar is raising up to a point where web developers may have to think like software developers.

    Thats the scary part...

    Gregor

  2. Re:AJAX and Comet by Now.Imperfect · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:AJAX and Comet by imidan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've been having discussions about that in my job recently. With AJAX as the new web development buzzword, people are coming to me and asking if we can put AJAX into every project. A lot of the web-based applications that I work on would not benefit from asynchronous communication--they really work best using the traditional synchronous request/response model.

    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.

  4. Re:Just imagine... by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Just imagine... by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The revisionist history where people imagine that Microsoft is behind because they're just not as advanced as their competitors really is laughable.

    Er, "behind" and "less advanced" are synonymous.

    Microsoft was a mile ahead and then decided they really wanted to run the 20K instead of the 100m.

    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