xml-dev - Re: PC Week on "Why XML is Failing" ?????

["Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Tchistopolskii" <paul@qub.com>
To: "'xml-dev'" <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 12:13 AM
Subject: Re: PC Week on "Why XML is Failing" ?????


> > You got me there!  Ballmer's hype is pretty monumental, paraphrased
later in
> > this article as "Ballmer's optimism that XML will flawlessly usher in a
new
> > means of doing business."
>
> Probably I don't understand the difference between MS hype
> and Sun/Oracle/Netscape/W3C hype, but I found *absolutely*  nothing
> extraordinary in Ballmer's statements ( I used the URL above,
> maybe you are discussing some other article ? )

Well, it was the phrase "flawlessly usher in a new means of doing business"
(not a quote, but a summary of Ballmer's presentation) that convinced me
that Ken North had a point here.  He's not saying anything *technically*
wrong, just glossing over little details such as the immense amount of work
it takes to agree upon and implement all the schemas, stylesheets, code,
etc. to implement the vision he sketches out.  We on XML-DEV probably
realize that it is still vastly easier than doing something like this
without XML, but Mr. Ballmer seems to me (and apparently to the journalist
in question) to be implying that it is easier than it really is.

Likewse, "Encoding data in XML will let various platforms 'talk' to each
other" doesn't mention that XML is just a common platform-neutral syntax,
and still requires hard work it takes to map semantic concepts from one
application to another. Again, Mr. Ballmer is not saying anything *wrong*,
just making it easy for the audience to believe that XML is a much bigger
part of the solution than it is in reality.  That's what I consider "hype".

I still think that it's absurd to say that "XML is Failing" because it
doesn't live up to this hype, but after reading Mr. Ballmer's words I'm
willing to concede that a reasonable and responsible journalist could find
the gap between the hype and reality newsworthy.



***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************