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MS has its own designs. So do others. When they figure
out they aren't winning, they embrace or withdraw. That
is competition not corruption. They can come to the table
with a lot of firepower and that scares people. The Internet
was held together for the first two and half decades by
being pretty much the property of the American Department
of Defense and when you only have one important customer,
it is fairly easy to keep things stable. In 1990 when
they dropped it, a band of brothers took over and created
their own fiefdom: the W3C. From customer to boss.
What is strange to me is that people are so afraid of
Microsoft that they will expend so much energy there.
Sure, it is a fact of culture-making that shared
paranoias are a feature of the hazing rituals, but
they end up making the same mistakes made on RSS and
now son-of-RSS. They run from one uncertainty to the
next instead of disposing of the one uncertainty the
market will use: ownership. If they make the mistake
Userland did, they co-opt. If they do what VRML did,
they find an organization to work with them.
OTOH, I've seen small communities stand up to MS
and win and still get MS's begrudging support. VRML
did it. MS got madder than forty wet dogs, but it didn't
do them any good and their attempts to put a competitor
in (Chrome) failed because the VRMLers had a good solution
that was in the sweet spot of capability and cost and they
found an easy legal means to protect the asset. It
depends on the strategy for disposition of the standard
or specification. Leave that too open and not only
MS but IBM, Sun, etc. will walk right over and take it.
And deservedly. If syndication really is the nextBigThing,
expect an aggregator and free publishing tools to be
bundled into future products from IBM, MS, Apple and so
on. Will they be RSS compliant? Sure. Will they
be son-of-RSS compliant? Sure. Will they enable
ad sales? Sure. Will they be extended by perfectly
legal namespaced XML tags? Sure. Is that corruption?
Nope. That is what XML enables and the web thrives on.
Some think the web a community; I think it an information
ecosystem and undirected ecosystems are cruel. Directed
ones can be but at least their is a locus to be modified.
It isn't that others don't contribute. That is expected.
It is what they expect to get or keep for contributing
that one might question. My only point in all of this
is that planning for that from day one is smart. Leaving
that to fate is not.
We created the environment in which BigCos thrive. We
have to be at least as smart about how to do that too.
Many a sharecropper did successfully get their own farm.
It was a way to get started. Many a sharecropper lived
their whole lives comfortably on those farms. Others
moved on to bigger and better things. The Smart Ones.
Taking MS or IBM head on isn't smart. Using them
to get what one wants is. That is what they and their
products are there for. T&Cs are negotiable if one
goes to the table with something of value. If one
made it worthless by failing to protect it, that
is one's own lack of smarts, not theirs.
len
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
i'm sorry len, but i couldn't disagree more
ms put a lot of effort into corrupting so many early efforts (remember
msn was going to be the real computer network, not the current
internet?, c# will replace java because it runs so well on every
computer (sic), .net is all i need to rule the world, etc) and really
"gave in" to the standards efforts and the success of the open and
simple ethernet and tcp/ip protocols and standards.
in fact the internet's success is really the success of non-proprietary
efforts, especially the rfc's - yes ms contributed, but so did lots of
others.
bit then that's why this is such a healthy list, we've all got opinions
and prejudices and in that mix somewhere is a good result for all.
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