This is a really interesting collection of Blogobillia!
It starts here with one of many excerpts from Scoble's blog:
Dave Winer, Jon Udell, and now Gerald Bauer says that Microsoft is killing the Web. Or trying to.
The guys above are pretty seasoned individuals (they save me a lot of writing too amongst other things).
Now here is a response from Microsoft?s Blog evangelist supremo Scoble to their comments and genuine concerns.
OK, let's assume that's true.
Microsoft has 55,000 employees. $50 billion or so in the bank.
Yet what has gotten me to use the Web less and less lately? RSS 2.0.
Seriously. I rarely use the browser anymore (except to post my weblog since I use Radio UserLand).
See the irony there? Dave Winer (who at minimum popularized RSS 2.0) has done more to get me to move away from the Web than a huge international corporation that's supposedly focused on killing the Web.
Now, let's look at what's really going on here. We're going back to being a great platform company. We're trying to provide a platform that lets developers build new applications that are impossible to build on other platforms. At the PDC you saw some of that. New kinds of forms. New kinds of games. New kinds of business apps. New kinds of experiences.
But, we also are looking for ways to make the Web better too. Now, we haven't talked about what we're doing with the browser. I hear that'll come later. Astute Longhorn testers have already seen that we snuck a pop-up ad blocker into the browser without telling anyone about it. Whoa. That means we're gonna turn off MSN's capabilities of selling popup ads.
I hear there's more coming too. But, why should we do it all? Wasn't the point of the past four years to get Microsoft to stop trying to do it all? The DOJ and now the European Union are still after us cause we tried to do it all. Instead, let's just go back and be a great platform company.
We just gave you a great foundation for a killer new kind of application. One that goes FAR beyond HTML. And, even if you stick with Mozilla, your experiences on Longhorn will get better. For instance, fonts are being rendered in the GPU now on Longhorn. Your Web pages will look better and behave better on Longhorn than they will on any other platform. Period.
And wait until Mozilla's and other developers start exploiting things like WinFS to give you new features that display Internet-based information in whole new ways.
If Microsoft really wants to create a better platform shouldn?t this be truly futuristic? If so, then it should issue the first major salvo by dropping the restrictions on Rotor?
We are moving into the distributed component based computing age where runtime environments (.NET CLR, Mono, J2EE, and others) act a Component Execution Junction boxes (instead of the Monolithic Operating Systems of today) in a continuum of services orchestrated by messages in response to events emanating from value consumption requests (what we call application behviour today) from a myriad of value consumers (application users).
There is no need for covert and protracted protection of an obsolete Windows Operating System (the underlying fear that keeps Rotor shackled in my opinion), since its obsolescence is in full motion as Longhorn clearly demonstrates.
Imagine a fusion of sorts across Microsoft .NET, Mono, and Rotor, with a single portable runtime as the end product (slotting nicely into its place in the imminent distributed component and services era). All the benefits of programming language independence in true glory - the ECMA-CLI is all about programming language independence. Now that would be unequivocally revolutionary, and Microsoft would actually be doing what I think it has been desperately trying to achieve for a long time; the delivery of really cool technology that seriously impact us all in a positive way without the usual World Domination Concerns.
Anyway, back to the current reality where we have covert attempts to lock us all into Windows getting more and more transparent per technology release cycle. The very antithesis of what I espoused in the last paragraph (or dream). I believe that Scoble's instincts lie in this realm too, and you never know this evangelist may turn Messiah :-)
Here's the final excerpt from Scoble?s post:
There's a whole lot of more useful stuff coming. Both for the Web and for newer Internet-centric rich-client approaches. Personally, it's about time. I'm already using the Web less and less thanks to things like RSS 2.0.
I'm watching 636 sites every day. Try to do THAT in your Web browser.
So, yes, blame it on me. I'm trying to kill the Web. Isn't it time to move on? Didn't we move on from the Apple II? Didn't we move on from DOS? Didn't we move on from Windows 3.11? Can't you see a day when we move on from the Web and get something even more fantastic? I can. Dave Winer can. Why not you? [via The Scobleizer Weblog]
If you kill the Web en route to getting us a Portable Execution Junction box from Microsoft, I think you would have served mankind pretty damned well. We won't have to gripe about Web 1.0 (Browser Driven Web) because we would be well into Web 2.0 and beyond (which doesn?t define the Web experience predominantly via browsing).
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