Since many organisations have traditionally fallen prey to Microsoft in the field of the web (internet banking sites, to pick one of many examples), I thought I'd draw people's attention to the following article:
http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=174156 Key point: > That is the new browser war. Either tweak your web data to approximate > standards now, or risk the cost of a massive Longhorn infrastructure > upgrade in a few years' time. If you don't standardize now, you'll be > forced to buy or build that Longhorn infrastructure in order to access > the communities that Microsoft has managed to attract and bottle up > inside Longhorn. Another quote: > Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war > may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their > polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus > the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic--never to be > properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun--and > Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of > the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it. > > The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part > of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services > with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, > online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations > and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand > cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually > shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based > proprietary global infrastructure--a global version of the early Novell > NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For > Microsoft, the best possible outcome is for the standards-based web to be > reduced to the profitless: a few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, > and the disaffected. Few others will want to go there; so every day > there will be fewer traditional websites, every day less relevance. I personally think it would be wise to bring this article to the attention of relevant people in your organisation. It is a worry. luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
