Re: [xml-dev] Microsoft's deeply cynical appealto"standards compliance"

[Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>]

OK, in all seriousness -- the flip-flop yesterday by MSN *is* of real
concern.

The business about standards compliance was scary. Look out four years --
when SOAP is a ubiquitous communication protocol -- and Microsoft has
marginalized most of the competition (including UserLand in this scenario).

One little hiccup in their SOAP support by a stupid marketing manager and
the rest of us are out of business.

Now of course is the time to prevent this from happening. Try as hard as we
have, today in many if not most developers' minds SOAP interop means "Works
With Microsoft." This is a bug, not at Microsoft (only) but in the
independent developer community. This came up in an offlist thread yesterday
with some Microsoft people. It seems the interop agreement we reached in
April didn't make it into their products. Heh. Not a big surprise of course.

The takeaway from this, imho, is to work with other developers now, and
build meaningful apps that use SOAP and build on each others' work. Make it
so that when MS screws up they *have* to flip-flop. The fact that MSN is not
a monopoly is material. That's why it was just a mistake, and was corrected
quickly. It took a lot more noise-making to get them to flip on Smart Tags,
because MSIE is a monopoly. There are business reasons for them not to flip
there, and ultimately they will be able to manage the PR, even if it pisses
off Walt Mossberg.

In MSN's case, the smart business move was to be inclusive. With Smart Tags,
given their business model and Allchin's ruthlessness, eventually they will
come back, and all the noise will sound weak compared to the noise they can
create. (BTW, Microsoft thrives off the publicity they get from these
snafus.)

Also, there was more news yesterday in the software patents area.

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/10/25#patentbustingForFunA
ndProfit

Dave

PS: To Leigh, if you're going to do a roundup of this, I'd like to see this
pov in it. Thanks.