Another quote:
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.
If this is true, it represents a return to the cluelessness of the 1995 pre-"turning of the battleship" era for Microsoft.
Sorry for sounding like an old browser war veteran here, but I remember the days when magazines wrote about the next big thing: the Microsoft Network. People are going to want online services, and they're not going to go to the Internet, are they? That's for geeks. No, we normal people will get everything we need straight from Microsoft.
A couple of months later, the hastily revised MSN is no longer a separate, vastly superior network for normal people, but just another website.
Yes, Microsoft would like the web to be a one-way pipe from their servers to your eyeballs, but look at where the compelling apps that run on top of the web have come from. By this I mean the compelling apps for the rest of the world, not just geeks; file-sharing, instant messaging, etc. They haven't come from Microsoft; they don't want you to share, they want you to buy; they don't want you to talk to your friends, they want you to talk to Microsoft. And the next big thing on the web will come from the stereotypical two guys running a proprietary software company out of their garage, or from the free software community, because Microsoft doesn't innovate, it takes what others have done, locks it down, and strips all the value out of it.
Microsoft won't buy the web by perverting web standards. Netscape tried that when they were in a position of dominance, and it didn't work. However, they might buy the web through "rights management" and "security".
What Microsoft will do by perverting web standards is keep the office.
Imagine an organisation that keeps all it's documents as XHTML (or whatever markup language is appropriate for the document type) and CSS instead of .doc format. All of that information available for context-rich indexing, and instantly formatted appropriately for web/print/audio/whatever. No vendor lock-in. No license fees. No forced upgrades. Plug it all into whatever kind of application you might want to devise.
Microsoft are afraid of the same thing they were afraid of in the 90's: "the middleware threat", which has the potential to hurt them in the only areas of their business that make money; the OS and Office. If they have any sense, they won't be chasing web services, they'll be gunning for XUL and any other open technology that threatens their core business.
Matthew.
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