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Michael Champion <mc@xegesis.org> writes:
> On Sunday, Oct 26, 2003, at 16:01 America/Detroit, Tim Bray wrote:
> >
>
> > So what possible reason could Microsoft have for *not* making an
> > investment in RelaxNG?
> >
>
> I'm not sure I agree with Len that MS are being "nice guys" and
> leaving this to the open source community, but they do have an open
> (in the sense of well-defined and extensible) architecture that
> clearly can support an aftermarket. So, what reason could open source
> projects or startup companies not have for building, say, a
> RelaxNG-powered Office 2003 plugin
There is the stigma that Microsoft leave "open" the parts they don't
want to develop or are not sure there is a market for. Where the
company has seen a market and an opportunity, they have very
convincingly come out with offerings that beat their competition into
oblivion, or sincerely attempted to. (Not just browsers and office
suites, think media players, CD-writers, C compilers, virtual
machines, IDEs).
If a startup assumes a technology will not see wide use in the MS
world, they won't develop it. If they think it will get adopted, they
assume that adoption will lead to MS involvement in the market, and
the only viable exit strategy will be to try and sell the technology
to Microsoft. Not every startup's idea of success is a Microsoft
buyout. Certainly, not every open source project's.
> I have s sinking feeling that the open source projects won't do it
> because of the well-known antipathy of MS for open source (and vice
> versa?), and the startups won't invest because they figure that some
> open source project will do it. I hope I'm wrong!
I'm afraid you're right, but not for the reasons you state.
Ari.
--
Elections only count as free and trials as fair if you can lose money
betting on the outcome.
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