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

[Dave]

On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 15:32:07 -0400, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> 
> Dave:
> 
> > People believe that OSS is just as capital earning as closed software, but
> > that its open nature means that monopolozation is less likely and thus
> > opportunities are increased.
> 
> Do *you* believe that?

I have not seen any real advantages to an open system thus far. I have
to admit I'm not the most technical person in the world, but besides
bringing in a community aspect to the whole thing, I have not seen
true advantages to OSS from my POV and the applications and services
that I use on a day-to-day basis. Lets just say that the big bang from
OSS is missed on the end products that I produce. Obviously, they are
helping others, but one could say that companies like IBM are just
grasping at straws b/c our gov'ts refuse to deal w/ the monopoly.

> > That being said, I think there is another issue here. <sticking head
> > out of shell slowly>What if, IF!, Longhorn is all that and it brings
> > to market what any OSS couldn't imagine doing in the same timeframe at
> > the same level of support and professionalism?
> 
> What would that be?

RIAs. XUL for me stinks, so is there anohter OSS based RIA
infrastructure that will do it as well as MS? That could? That could
do it by bringing in all teh aspects from OS to client together? I
don't think so. I'm not saying that Longhorn is done, but it is
jumping a step or two further than anything else out there.

> > What if, the web is ready to die as we know it
> 
> Are there any signs of it?

G-d I hope so b/c I think it is ugly, clunky, unusable, and a disaster
to the betterment of software interaction design. Please, please,
please let it die!!!!
As for signs of its death ... there are none and I think this is the
fault to the boom's/bust's residual effect and is not about the true
needs of end-users for using distributed information gathering
applications. There is NOTHING about HTML or even xHTML worth saving
... sorry.

> > and it is time for a new technology to come along and better it?
> 
> Like what? Name one thing in Longhorn that's "new."

"new"? oooo! scary quotes, eh? A text-based (non binary) RIA
infrastructure that is rich enough to finally work that is embedded at
the OS level for better performance. A dismantling of the browser so
that networked-based applications can have their own client
infrastructure. Even flash can't do this. No matter what it is reliant
on the browser or central.

There are other offerings in Longhorn, such as its advanced graphics
GUI (for those w/ the power) that are also interesting, but is beyond
the scope of this discussion. Is it "new"? any of it? I mean even a
Mac wasn't new when it was considered "new". So no. But is it bringing
to the mainstream in a new way something that is rejected b/c it is
too peripheral to truly consider in a mass market way ... definitely.
Is MS the only company thta can do this? YES!!!! b/c they are the only
ones w/ the right market share to bring these "innovations" to market
in a way that developers will use.

> > No one is really morning the death of Gopher, eh?
> 
> Hey, speak for yourself.:-)

I knew you weren't going to let this go ... Ziya as always you are one
in a million. ;) I bet if I walked out my door right now and asked the
people in times sq. what "gopher" is, i bet NO ONE will say a
predecessor of the web that blah blah blah. "It's dead, Jim." ;)

> > I mean imagine if every TV maker used different protocols for
> > interpretting TV signals? It would be a mess, no?
> 
> Yes it would be. So would a single company owning NTSC, PAL or SECAM.
> Therein lies the crux of the matter. (Incidentally, there are many more TV
> standards than this, but for that's another day.)

Sure ... even HDTV. Think of the CD issues. The large corps just came
together and said if we are all going to succeed we are going to
license this from SONY and deal w/ it. Now that the patent is over,
its all up for grabs ... Why can't software work the same way? Let
someone win for 20 years and then patent laws allow for a free for all
shortly there after. ;)

> 
> > I mean aren't we reaching a point where we just gotta let the better
> > app/solution win?
> 
> What's "better"?

Anything than the mess we have now. W3C solutions are not good enough
... IE solutions are too proprietary. OSS solutions are a mess ... So
now what? Better is as better does, so to speak so lets get over the
Monopoly phobia and deal w/ teh fact that MS won, we all lost but lets
move on.

> 
> > I just think that we OSS for the front-end has shown me no successes
> > to date as a designer trying to solve real world problems compared to
> > the closed solutions in my life: IE, Flash, Java, etc.
> 
> The latter two (Flash and Java, like PDF, etc) run on many platforms, the
> first (IE) locks you into one. Surely you see the difference?

This is a good point ... but still you can bring in the music CD
example. It was owned by Sony for years, yet everyone had to use it
and pay homage to the Sony g-d of CD encoding/decoding. Now it is past
its patent period and voila the price of cd-players went down
exponentially since then. yea!

The other option to all this is that we governmentize the standards of
software ... Yikes, scary, I know ... but it seems that the Internet
is the property of media and thus like airwaves and broadcast
protocols needs to be controlled by the gov't.

Like that is ever going happen, right? Way too late for that, b/c
there are way too many bucks to be made w/ the current system.

All I know is that the current system makes my life way too hard as
both designer and end-user. The PC, the Internet, and Web, etc. are
way too hard for people to use and a big part of the latter two being
so hard to use is b/c we are stuck in antiquity using 10 year old
technology instead of what is at hand and we can't use what is at hand
b/c everyone is doing it their own way.

If someone could come up w/ a viable solution other than giving up and
letting the alpha male control all (in lieu of a gov't w/ a backbone
to stand up against them) please let me know.

-- dave