Re: [Off Topic] An EXCELLENT Microsoft Confidential document on
At 11:46 PM 11/7/98 +1100, Hamish Moffat wisely observed:
>He makes the point that IBM developed Token Ring to decommodize Ethernet.
>That may be true, but Token Ring was a better system than Ethernet. As
>MCA is/was better than ISA. Both of these lost out because they required
>licensing. Is there any sign that Microsoft's protocols are actually
>better than the open equivalents?
>
The ongoing story of Java, 'embraced and extended' by Microsoft may be the
best sign of how their next de-commodization project will go. The author of
the Pulpit web page, referred to earlier in this thread, details how MS
Java extensions had insidious effects on applications written inside the
standard.
IMHO, the typical personal home page writer does not care as much about
adherence to a standard as getting the neatest effects. If 'HTML with MS
extensions' has animated 3-D GIFs, _and_ if standard HTML GIFs suddenly
take on a strange spatial separation of red and blue, _and_ if the casual
home page writer thinks, 'what the heck, 99% of my visitors are on Windows
anyway,' then the commodity of the standard begins to be ignored in favor
of the propietary de-facto standard.
If MS is successful at 'embracing and extending' Java, then HTML, TCP/IP
and the OSS world will soon feel the suffocating arms of MS wrapped around
them.
mctech
"In the history of great ideas and great innovations, there is not a single
accountant in the list."
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