[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Listera]

Hyperbole? Alarmist? Spot on? Likely to change how you'll be designing your
apps/sites in a few years?

Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite
<http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174156&seqNum=6>

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.

----
Ziya

Architecture is politics.