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
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.
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
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.
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
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
Maybe they'd call it a "Miki" and get sued by Disney, and both companies will drive each other into bankruptcy?
We can only hope.
Colgate-Palmolive Company, New York, NY 10022.
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.
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".
Has MS sued anyone over Mono patents? No.
However look here and here.
You don't need to sue someone so stifle progress as evidenced by the fact their Mono patents are currently stifling progress by the risk of lawsuits where Microsoft could easily remove that threat.
I stole this Sig