[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Aaron Skonnard wrote:
>
>...
>
> I give full credit to TBL for "inventing" the Web and the technologies
> it was built on. I give credit to vendors like Netscape and MS for
> making it ubiquitous today (and I'm not going to defend MS's business
> practices).
As I recall it, the Web was doubling in popularity every six months (not
every year, as I said before), before Microsoft or Netscape were
involved. What evidence do you have that bigco participation was
necessary to keep up this pace? Did Napster need a bigco to become
mainstream? (before it was sued out of existence!)
Let me suggest the opposite theory. Where there is a big user community,
big companies will get involved, whether they add new value or not.
That's a good thing, because usually they do add value. But their
arrival is a *consequence* of popularity and success, not a *cause* of
popularity and success. For further evidence we can look at the various
phenomena that are reaching the mainstream without bigco participation
like peer to peer file sharing, mailing lists and blogs.
If Web Service technologies only find approval with vendors then they
will go the way of DCOM and CORBA. You need *user pull* for vendor
solutions. We are in serious danger of having our hype bubble pricked
when people try to implement real systems and find out that this stuff
is really difficult both conceptually and because of bloat in the
standards.
Paul Prescod
|
