Hello,
Nigel McFarlane - of "Rapid Application
Development with Mozilla XUL" book fame - has written
up an article titled "Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The
Browser Wars Reignite" about Microsoft's plan to take
over the web.
Nigel writes:
Think the web browser wars are over? Think again.
World War I was dubbed “The Great War" and "The War To
End All Wars.” Alas, that was an optimistic
prediction; WWII followed in short order. The browser
wars are coming back, and this time the whole World
Wide Web is at risk, not just a few browsers and their
vendors.
Now if you wonder if Nigel has forgotten to take
his pills and should just kick back and relax. Read
on. Nigel spells out how Microsoft plans to take over
the commercial web.
Nigel writes:
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.
Full story @
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174156
or
http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=174156
Do you agree with Nigel that Microsoft wants to
destroy the web as we know it with Longhorn and that
Microsoft hates the web because it's a zero-profit
zone that competes with Windows?
Or do you buy Microsoft's party line that Longhorn
is just the next version of Windows. That's it. No
hidden agenda to conquer the web by lets say offering
a richer alternative that protects your content using
digital rights management.
Do you think it's just a coincidence that Internet
Explorer has been frozen for the last three years and
won't get revived anytime soon?
Please, post your comments and thoughts to xul-talk
(just change the mail address from xul-announce to
xul-talk).
- Gerald
-------------------
Gerald Bauer
Open XUL Alliance - A Rich Internet For Everyone |
http://xul.sourceforge.net
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