Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Note to self: learn to write software
So does Microsoft have a patent on AJAX? Can they leverage their parenting of the technology to stifle progress once again? Who owns AJAX?
Personally, the whole AJAX thing is cool, and at the same time scary.
I'm a web developer, and right now I am really getting into the stride of making very good apps, very quickly.
With AJAX, the expectations will rise considerably. The development effort will go way up...all to do the same things we are doing now.
I know that this sounds stupid to a lot of you...but think about games. Better graphics increase development time and effort, but don't necessarily make a better game.
Soon, EVERY web app will need to be an AJAX app...even if it doesn't need to be.
The age of simple software is once again coming to a close.
No reason to lie.
Mr Gates is probably laying the framework for changes in the AJAX support in IE aimed at breaking competitors products.
That has to be the worst idea to come out of a marketing drone since synergistic paradigm. At least Microsoft is actually working on new stuff lately. Google and Firefox have urged them to restart their old habits of copying that we haven't seen since the mid nineties.
Later this year Microsoft is planning to release a hard drive based MP3 player.
These guys are so far behind the times it's not even funny. The next thing you know they'll be talking about how we really need something to search the web with, or an online way to look up an address. Hey, here's an idea, we'll make a website that contains information about stuff and make it editable by everyone.. We can call it a Wiki!
My software never has bugs.
It just develops random features.
...how powerful and profitable Microsoft would be if they weren't always five years late to the party.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has been late to the race. They are the masters of catch up and making the most of what someone else pioneered.
Slashdotters are quick to laugh at Micro$oft, but Microsoft is the one laughing all the way to the bank.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
There you have it Slashdotters. Here, Microsoft has some innovation to show. Sincerely, I have been slashdotting for a long time and can say I have seen very little if anything about M$ being recognized for its innovation.
This I believe, is one of them. Thank you M$.
Memo to self-
Stop writing memos.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Dear Anonymous Coward,
;)
Let me just say that—
Sorry, Billy got a BSOD. He'll send his message momentarily.
And by momentarily, I mean in no less time than 72 hours.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Oh, they managed to exploit it, albeit indirectly.
yes, amazing. zonk dissapears for a while, comes back, posts 2 dupes in a day.
-- lol pwned
I agree with PBS's Robert X Cringely: the leak's just a distraction. It's only there to make Wall St. think Microsoft is still relevant and on the edge of the wave.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
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.
AJAX is a good idea for larger services, like Gmail, that many people use and it is completely seamless. However, AJAX is much harder to code, and it's not necessary for a smaller company, which doesn't need the marginal gains vs. the coding. Still, for a large company like Google, it takes less time to load (which makes Gmail seem better) and also saves bandwidth.
Did anyone else first read the title as "Another Baleeted Microsoft Memo"? :/
Zonk 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 DUPES (that Slashdot 'invented but failed to exploit'). The Economist says 'As in previous cases, what is new is not the story itself, but the fact that Slashdotters are taking it seriously.' Commander Taco of Slashdot decided against writing a memo. 'Posting dupes is easy,' he says, whereas 'professional quality editing is a whole lot harder.'"
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
From TFA: This prompted yet another memo from Marc Benioff, the marketing-savvy boss of Salesforce.com, a leading proponent of the software as a service model. If Microsoft were serious about Web 2.0 and Microsoft Live, he suggested helpfully in an internal memo sent to the press, it should rename its traditional software Microsoft Dead. Web 2.0, he said, was not about old companies constrained by their legacy products but new firms such as, naturally, Salesforce.com, Writely, Numsum, Zimbra and Goffice.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
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.
Microsoft has a project called 'Atlas' that has a set of prebuilt controls and javascript files that you can use for your projects. It can be found at asp.net. The nice thing about this project is you can define an Atlas (it's just AJAX really) control the same way you define a typical asp control ( vs. ) and then link in the pre-defined .js files. I have been reading about AJAX for a while now on Slashdot (my employeer has been using it for quite a while now and I didn't even know it) but hadn't tried it out. Atlas is so simple that I had my first page converted in a matter of minutes. An earlier submitter pointed out that not all pages need to be converted or built using AJAX but the customer is demanding it. This is an interesting topic, and I have considered this myself. I have found that almost every page in the types of websites that I create don't need this technology. Most of them are your typical form where you just insert data and update a database. If you don't need a high level of interactivity, AJAX might not be the best option.
After you said that writing code is a whole lot harder than writing a memo, I got to thinking: When was the last time Bill Gates coded anything? I mean I was just wondering. For all the supposedly evil things his company has done, albeit with him at the helm, he started out as a geek. Geeks like to do geeking things, I don't care how old you are... what do you think he's done recently?
to provide the "X" in AJAX, but the concept was envisioned by Netscape all along.
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".
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.
I agree with your premise. Microsoft often can't afford to take advantage of truly innovative technology, because that technology might erode their desktop monopoly.
Some of the logic along the way is... problematic.
Microsoft introduced ActiveX to ensure the web was tied to their platform. The reason ActiveX was "much maligned" is because it was just DCOM wrapped up in web semantics. Since DCOM was poorly-designed, ActiveX inherited many problems, including extremely poor security. At the time, CORBA was the standard for remote execution, and although it was a standard, it had many drawback when compared to DCOM-- namely, poor implementations that often didn't work together properly, naming service issues (still a problem, though its getting better), and huge bloat / performance issues.
Their platform was hardly fantastic. It was cobbled together, riddled with stability and security issues, and was tied intimately to the MS-Windows platform. The primary reason nobody adopted it on the web, outside of the compatibility nightmare, was that ActiveX controls required a Microsoft server on the other end, meaning exposing an important service to the internet. I believe that was Microsoft's intent-- get application developers to use ActiveX (most app developers were MS-Windows developers), and force the sysadmins to install MS-Windows servers to support them. But that might just be paranoid delusions on my part.
I'm glad you remember to glory days of ActiveX and IIS servers with such a warm fuzzy glow. All I remember were the serious ActiveXploits, IIS worms, and performance problems created by this "fantastic platform."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Microsoft is far ahead of the curve on "AJAX" stuff its not even funny. Hell, Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest 7 years ago or so. And Ajax is a joke compared to something like XAML and a .NET runtime in the browser. It'll make all this html/css/javascript+dom look like the stone age, and it'll all be in the browser. Word and anything else they want to run will look and almost act native. I used Visual Studio ActiveX that responded reasonably years ago.
Microsoft DID NOT invent Ajax.
..... da ta da da! Next. Given that the only thing it (the web) could run on at the time was Next... I guess Steve Jobs had more to bring to bear in creating Ajax than MS did.
.... it had to exist post Sun creation. Sun was created After the Http request was first used. Java was first created in 1991, and introduced to the public in 1994. LONG after javascript had existed.
Ajax = Asynchronous Javascript and XML.
XML is a subset of SGML which existed before M$.
Javascript is a child of LiveScript, both were created by Netscape. Nothing in what is Ajax was ever created by M$ period. The fact that they are able to see the value and talk it up is cool, but they invented none of it.
Now I'm sure someone will bring up M$ Remote Scripting. It like LiveScript where basically in house products. Remote Script did not exist in the public realm. However at the time of it's "creation", M$ was lacking a viable browswer (Definition of Viable is it works.) IE 1.0 and 2.0 where total jokes, 3.0 was the equal of Netscape 1.0 and 4.0 began to work. By this time however both MS and Netscape were fully supporting LiveScript/JavaScript (Sometimes in name only, as each tried to extend beyond the other.)
But in short Please, stop say M$ invented Ajax. This is like claiming that Honda invented the Car. They build them yes but they did not invent them.
Now according to wikipedia something called. Remote Scripting supposedly pre-dated HTTP requests. (according to Wikipedia.) Nope.. sorry didn't. The concept of HTTP requests etc had been layed out for a long time before M$ existed (pre-dating the Altair) But it took Berners-Lee to be able to make it usable and, Stanford Linear Accelorator to do the most important step. Create a Distant End. In fact at the time the ONLY usable OS for this was
Since Remote Scripting required a Java applet to work
So no, I had more to do with Ajax than M$ did. And I had nothing at all to do with the concept.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
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.
"and a .NET runtime in the browser"
.net runtime works in firefox on the mac or linux and then we'll talk. Until then, you bear the mark of somebody who just doesn't get it.
Just what we want. A non-portable solution that only works in Windows in IE.
Great solution.
I'll bet you think everybody should install the jet engine on their desktop, because its so fucking standardized. Whee! Throw whatever MS wants onto your desktop and make sure the next application crashes because of version incompatibilities. What a terrific idea.
Let me know when the
"3, Insightful"? How 'bout "0, Uninformed"? The crimes laid out in Thomas Penfield Jackson, U.S. District Judge's COURT'S FINDINGS OF FACT are criminal under any reasonable legal system, including those of a 'truly free society'. There is an old saying: "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose" that is applicable. 5-year perspective on the case is interesting. Microsoft regularly flexes their patent muscle by refusing to grant use of patents it owns to competitors. E.g. Bill Gates himself has turned down patent licensing requests for use of Microsoft patents proposed as IETF standards. (google Microsoft IETF patent or read this) Their anti-competitive practices most certainly do involve patents. Patent abuse is even an incriminating component of the above FINDINGS OF FACT. And Microsoft's abuses go far beyond those discussed in the FINDINGS OF FACT; see http://kmfms.com/whatsbad.html.
Make 'em pay! http://Payola.org #include "stddisclaimer