Guy,
I have been biting my tongue, but your email was too provocative.
Generally, I agree with your points. My additional comments:
* The open source phenomenon is huge. The same phenomenon that transformed
the server world (what with LAMP) is starting to affect the client world.
Although the threat isn't imminent, over the next few years MS is in danger
of losing control over the browsing experience to Mozilla and Safari, both
of which are open source and both of which implement W3C standards
successfully. Firefox's market share is likely to accelerate in the
short-term as Enterprises discover its merits as a strong platform for
application development and begin to require its usage instead of IE for
Enterprise applications. This will result in larger numbers of people who
start to feel comfortable with Firefox (because of being forced to use it
at their company) and therefore comfortable in abandoning IE for browsing
the Web. (Note that Google is investing a ton of money in Mozilla these
days. Microsoft is very much aware of this.)
* As a result, Microsoft will be forced to re-embrace standards in order to
stop the loss of market share and reclaim control over their own Windows
platform. Microsoft will be forced to do whatever it takes in order to push
Firefox's (and Safari's) market shares down below 5% once again, and
(unfortunately for them) in today's world that includes world-class support
for open standards. And, thanks to the leadership at Firefox, Safari, and
Opera, SVG has become a requirement. Microsoft has been aware of all of
this for a long time. Therefore, I expect to see SVG support in IE betas by
the end of 2007.
* I would be hugely surprised if Microsoft followed Adobe's lead and
announced VML end-of-life in the same (unacceptable) manner as Adobe.
Microsoft is considerably more sensitive to supporting their existing
community of developers. When VML is EOL'd, Microsoft will give something
like a 5-year window before VML quits working with new versions of IE.
Or at least that what my personal crystal ball shows.
Jon
Guy Morton
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
au> To
Sent by: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED] cc
hoogroups.com
Subject
Re: [svg-developers] Re: Is Adobe's
09/07/2006 04:20 greed clearing the way for XAML
PM
Please respond to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
hoogroups.com
Yes, it gives the lie to the lip service they give to standards
adherence. M$ in particular only support those standards that they
feel benefit their business (like someone else said, there's no other
reason for them to release software for free).
Honestly, how hard would it have been from MS to enable native SVG
support, given that they already had VML, which has been in IE since
v5? Should we really believe their weasel words about it coming in
IE8? I don't think so!
I'm now wondering how long it will be before MS announces the EOL for
VML, as a way of trying to screw projects like http://dojo.jot.com/
Dojo2D and push everyone towards using XAML.
Personally, I'd be VERY reluctant to start porting apps to XAML,
given that at the moment even M$ are not committing to it being
available on anything but Vista - that's going to be a pretty limited
market for a long time, even putting to one side that it leaves any
non-windows users out in the cold. This might be fine for corporate
applications, but wake up people, there's plenty of users moving away
from Windows these days! From my web logs I'd say only 75% of users
are using IE now - 25% of users is a pretty big chunk to lose by
building your app using IE/Windows-dependent technology!
A cornerstone of the web is that it be accessible to all - this means
it must be cross-platform compatible. MS has never really wanted this
to be so, but it is. They'll keep trying to push a windows-centric
world view on the world, but i believe ultimately this must fail. The
web (and the world) is bigger than Microsoft (and Macrobe).
Guy
On 08/09/2006, at 8:25 AM, tbone58x wrote:
> So much for W3C establishd standards. How can you just walk away
> from this on such short notice?
>
> How can M$ and Adobe be part of the W3C when they do not adhere to
> what the group is all about? SVG has been around for nearly five
> years and is not slated to be part of IE7 - sad...
>
> --- In svg-developers@yahoogroups.com, "Randy George" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Geoffrey,
>>
>> I agree with your analysis. Here's my soapbox for what its
> worth :)
>>
>> Speaking honestly as a small independent developer, without
> an IE
>> option sticking with SVG is not really feasible, switching to Flash
> narrows
>> options and now also has a questionable life expectancy, while
> switching to
>> WFS-XAML is a painful but compelling opportunity to survive.
>>
>> In the long run rich client technology paves the way for web
>> services. MS is pulling out all stops to own the rich client
> technology
>> base. This could give them the competitive advantage in web services
>> analogous to OS ownership in the desktop hay day. MS would love to
> use their
>> waning OS advantage to leverage into rich client ownership before
> the window
>> of opportunity closes. MS is primarily concerned about the next
> generation
>> struggle for web services ownership, think Google. Though, I still
> wonder if
>> the XML factor reduces any competitive leverage MS hopes to gain.
>>
>> Adobe should be highly commended for their early and extensive
>> support of SVG, but their long term survival is on the line. From
> their
>> point of view SVG was only a competitive advantage against
> Macromedia and
>> they found a different way to counter that threat. Adobe's ceiling
> is the
>> competitive world of MS and Google as they struggle for ownership
> of web
>> services.
>>
>> Vista/WFS-XAML is projected to be available about the same
> time as
>> ASV EOL (but then Bill has been wrong before). Alternative native
> browser
>> SVG is still not up to ASV capabilities and without some kind of IE
> option,
>> native SVG only reaches a small percentage of users. WFS-XAML will
>> eventually be available to the 80%+ of users on MS IE. Also, WFS-
> XAML
>> supercedes SVG in some critical ways: 3D, built in gui widgets,
> hardware
>> graphics speed, C#/CLR in place of EcmaScript. XAML will be a
> better rich
>> client base than SVG 1.2. Where is SVG 2.0 with 3D vectors, a built
> in set
>> of gui widgets,...?
>>
>> If MS is wrong about Vista release dates, there could be a
> gap for
>> rich client web development for IE between the EOL of ASV and the
> release of
>> WFS-XAML. An overlapping download option for ASV is the best
> solution from a
>> web developer perspective. From an Adobe perspective, attempting to
> force
>> svg rich client development to move to Flash before XAML appears
> makes some
>> sense. However, closing down ASV so quickly may have little effect
> other
>> than alienating a small community of developers and raising nagging
>> questions about Flash's viability as well.
>>
>> As it turns out in 2 years Adobe/Flash could be gasping for
> air and
>> Flash developers should take note what Adobe policy has been toward
> the SVG
>> developer community. I imagine Adobe's bottom line strategic
> concern is
>> creation tools not rendering. Flash developers must likely plan for
> a
>> similar migration to XAML in just a few more years.
>>
>> The Open source Mozilla community will also be forced to
> counter
>> WFS-XAML in some way in order to keep from being leapfrogged and
> then
>> marginalize. My guess is that XAML rendering in FF will quickly
> trump
>> further development of SVG rendering unless MS patents force some
> kind of
>> enhanced SVG. Otherwise MS creates a whole new rich client internet
> which is
>> off limits to the open source browser world.
>>
>> However you look at it, MS is in the driver's seat in 2007.
> If they
>> choose to transcode image/svg+xml to XAML, they could with very
> little
>> effort. But why would they support image/svg+xml at all? The
> Adobe/Flash
>> world and the FF,Opera/SVG world will both be playing catch up
>> technologically.
>>
>> Ironically XML based rich clients are here to stay whether
> XAML or
>> SVG. Thin clients and fat clients look out!
>>
>> rkgeorge
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com [mailto:svg-
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> On Behalf Of Geoffrey Swenson
>> Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 1:32 AM
>> To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
>> Subject: [svg-developers] Is Adobe's greed clearing the way for XAML
>>
>> By abandoning SVG, the net effect for us and Adobe is that XAML is
> going to
>> be the way to go.
>>
>>
>>
>> Unless Adobe massively changes Flash to have a decent editor and
> improves
>> the ease of programming I just don't see it gaining a lot of
> developer
>> interest. Why should I pay almost $1000 for Flash and its tedious,
>> user-hostile graphic editor, the non-intuitive and overly animation-
> focused
>> timeline editor, when the same $1000 buys me the MSDN library
> including XAML
>> that was designed from the ground up to be a programmable graphical
>> environment?
>>
>>
>>
>> If you don't have $1000 for MSDN, just Notepad and a good XAML book
> &&
>> online help should get you a long ways, especially for web-based
> stuff.
>>
>>
>>
>> Microsoft can leverage their position as the largest software
> company to
>> make XAML a very complete solution in a way that nobody else can
> manage. I'm
>> sure that it will be, as usual, somewhat overdeveloped and bloated,
> but
>> since it is part of the graphical underpinnings of Vista, they must
> have got
>> it to work, unlike - for example - Firefox SVG which is still way
> behind the
>> soon-to-be-orphaned Adobe plug-in.
>>
>>
>>
>> If I am going to have to pick one technology, I'll take the one
> that runs on
>> most of the computers. I am also picking the one that makes
> development
>> easy. If it happens to be Open Source, fine, but if XAML ends up
> being the
>> way to go, so be it. It really helps to have a revenue stream to
> pay for a
>> lot of talented work. Just 5% of Microsoft's Vista budget is
> hundreds of
>> millions of dollars - even Adobe does not have that kind of money
> to spend
>> on this.
>>
>>
>>
>> By early next year IE7 and Vista will be released. Almost everyone
> running
>> XP will be automatically upgraded to IE7, so coverage will be
> fairly large
>> in a few weeks after the release.
>>
>>
>>
>> I don't agree with the reviewers that think that Vista / IE7 are a
> warmed
>> over copy of Apple and Firefox. Perhaps the user interfaces are
> nothing
>> really new, but under the hood is a whole host of improvements are
> going to
>> make development of custom graphical applications a lot easier.
> XAML is at
>> the core of this, and I am looking forward to it.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>>
>>
>>
>>
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