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

[Dave Collins]

So, in a nutshell:

a grassroots world community has found something truly useful, inclusive
and free, and a large corporation has come along and is attempting to
corner it, brand it and charge a subscription fee.

Sounds about par for the course.

Dave Collins
User Interface Design
Phoenix Interactive
300 Wellington Street
London ON, N6B 3P2
V: 519.679.2913 x292
F: 519.679.6773
E: dcollins at phoenix-interactive.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 2:33 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: [Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

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.


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