[sllug-members]: Evil Empire strikes back.

[Stuart Jansen]

On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 19:56 -0800, Mike Bourgeous wrote:
> >On AD 2007 January 26 Friday 10:22:43 AM -0700, rog wrote:
> > > It said Microsoft's XAML markup language was "positioned to replace 
> >HTML,"
> >
> >Hahaha!  I'm having a hard time believing this.
> 
> Me too, especially when considering that's the first time I'd ever heard of 
> it, and I use the web very frequently and have a few web sites of my own.

/me rummages around in his memory

IIRC, XAML was announced about two years ago. It was the cause of much
controversy and stress in the F/OSS world. (Oh noes! Micro$oft is going
to pwn us with a patented proprietary product we can't possibly answer
fast enough!!!111oneoneone) At the time, the two best answers looked
liked XUL and/or Mono. AJAX was just starting to take off. If I could go
back in time I'd love to be able to tell everyone "Be calm my children,
hard work, smart frameworks, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest will be our
salvation." ... I would have been laughed at then ignored, but the smug
sense of almost certain vindication would have been good enough for me.

As for why you've never hear of it? Well, I can't answer that. But I
assure you that Microsoft's original announcement was like discovering a
mini-deathstar hovering just behind the moon.

Which brings me to the real reason I'm replying:

About six months ago I read an essay reviewing the numerous technologies
Microsoft has announced, instantly crippling or killing competitors with
mere words. Fast forward a few years and what they actually delivered
(if they delivered) was a mere shadow of the original announcement. I
already knew MS's reputation for FUD, but this was the first
multi-decade survey of actual events I'd seen. (It was on a pro-Mac
site. I'm too lazy to look for the link.)

About two weeks ago, I read an essay by a former MS employee pointing
out MS's love for building giant, complex, earth shaking, unified
development ecologies then presenting them wholly formed to the world as
if appearing from the head of Zeus. The author contrasted this to the
F/OSS approach of combining  discrete, loosely coupled technologies and
doing frequent incremental updates based on real-world usage. As a
result, Apache has had useful things like mod_rewrite for ages and ISS
still doesn't. (Again, too lazy. But if you've been following Slashdot,
Planet Ruby on Rails, and programming.reddit.com, you might've seen it
too.)

Which brings me to why I barely care about Microsoft at all anymore.
Once upon a time, I mostly ignored but kinda feared. Today, I'm just
impatient for them to catch up with everyone else and start contributing
to the F/OSS community instead of fighting it. 

(Fifteen years ago I hated my IBM because they were the rich bully.
Imagine my surprise and chagrin when IBM embraced F/OSS and started
participating instead of dictating. Four years ago I predicted that I'd
someday admire Microsoft too. If you look closely, you can already see
it starting to happen.)

To me, the current Microsoft is a T-Rex. Giant, powerful, scary looking.
The F/OSS community is the annoying hairy little creatures too
de-centralized for MS to effectively hunt. Microsoft may be perfect
evolved for the last 20 years, but the times they are a changing and the
meek shall inherit the earth. (Eventually. After some really gruesome
carnage.)

-- 
Stuart Jansen              e-mail/jabber: sjansen at buscaluz.org
                           google talk:   stuart.jansen at gmail.com

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at 
the results." -- Winston Churchill
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