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."

Comments

Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares.

XML

[hostingreviews]

I hear their tinkering with the XML standard too. MS: back off.

Gonna go Radio Active! Bad for RSS.

[twitter]

If you think of Windoze IE as security hole now, just wait till they finish bolting on RSS and mixing it with Active X, Browser Help Objects and all that. Let's imagine the perfect M$ implementation:

• I can imagine them setting up a clearing house site, much like Apple's, which hides the actual address.
• IE will automatically add all your favorite porn sites to your feeds and send copies to M$, the CIA and your boss, how helpful. The porn site will then send your new IE RSS client, which is "integrated" into the OS, an 0wnership invitation it can't refuse. The same kinds of people will polute M$'s feed lists.
• The ability to "join" your friends to RSS by email or IM.

  • I could go on, but you get the idea. All the usual M$ flaws and spyware friendly technology will be added to anything M$ embraces and extends. That's how they give everything a bad name which ultimately extinguishes everything.

Live, more Marketing BS aimed at Free Software.

[twitter]

what the heck is 'Live' supposed to mean? Any ideas?

It's an attempt to confuse users about Live CDs. "Live" sounds good and other people have made enough buzz that Joe Sixpacks is starting to hear. At this point M$ swoops down with six alternate jargon terms to confuse everyone and slow down trial and adoption of alternate desktops that blow M$'s expensive shit out of the water for ease of use and functionality.

It's kind of like the language they use about Trusted Computing. It's designed to confuse in a way that's advantageous to them. Quoted from the FSF:

When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets"--but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this somewhat of an absurdity in the context of palladium.

The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack", "malicious code", "spoofing", as well as "trusted". None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling palladium. And so on.

Every feature added to Windows has Microsoft control as it's ultimate aim. Every word Microsoft uses has the same goal. The purpose of that control is to keep your money flowing to them to fund yet more restrive controls.