Hello, Joel Spolsky has written an essay about why Windows 2007 (Longhorn/Avalon/XAML) will be a non-starter and why the future belongs to the web.
Joel concludes: The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing. Joel on Internet Explorer: So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application. Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows. It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of excitement..." The trouble is: it's too late. More @ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html Do you agree with Joel's conclusion that Windows 2007 can't compete against the Web 1.0 or the Web 2.0? - Gerald ------------------- Gerald Bauer Open XUL Alliance - A Rich Internet For Everyone | http://xul.sourceforge.net XUL News Wire | http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.xul.announce ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by The 2004 JavaOne(SM) Conference Learn from the experts at JavaOne(SM), Sun's Worldwide Java Developer Conference, June 28 - July 1 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA REGISTER AND SAVE! http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf Priority Code NWMGYKND _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
