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10 Biggest Microsoft Surprises of 2005
IZ Reloaded writes "The Microsoft Watch has a top 10 list of the biggest Microsoft surprises of the year. Among the surprises are Internet Explorer rising from the dead, Microsoft gets RSS and Microsoft Office team blogging. From Microsoft Watch: MS 'gets' RSS: While some folks were less than overjoyed that Microsoft was tinkering with the "little orange RSS box," Microsoft ended up looking like a company with a clue when it came to outlining its company-wide RSS strategy in 2005. RSS support will be built into not just Internet Explorer 7.0, but also Outlook 12 and Windows Vista itself. Almost all Microsoft blogs and sites have RSS feeds these days. RSS is gospel in Redmond these days."
It has many uses. Just not everybody needs it.
For example, I have a Subversion post-commit script that takes the changelog, formats it, and posts it on a blog on tikiwiki. This serves as a nice permanent record, and anybody who just wants to keep track of my progress can subscribe to the RSS feed.
Another nice use is security updates. Maybe I don't want to open the page for every distribution I use every day. It's a lot easier to see that something new appeared in the security folder.
But yeah, if your daily usage consists in going to slashdot every day, RSS makes little sense. It's most useful when you do not want to do that.