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On Monday, Nov 3, 2003, at 17:28 America/Detroit, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> Over time people have gotten this twisted belief
> that unless an XML technology is rubber stamped by some brahmins in
> some
> working group or technical committee then it isn't worthwhile. XML is
> about freedom not serfdom, the sooner the XML community and the
> software
> industry as a whole begin to realize this fundamental truth about XML
> the better for us all in the long run.
>
Absolutely! Just add "market strategist in Redmond" to the list of
brahmins, and I'll bet most people on this list would agree :-) The
"whining" about XAML, etc. is not about the right to innovate, i.e. to
do exactly what XML is supposed to be good for. It's a skepticism that
the problems being addressed by the innovations are the problems that
real people, who don't care whether software is elegant, or hard to
write, or if their processors are underutilized, actually suffer. It's
also a concern for the "network effect" that organized the party we're
all at -- cut down on the ability of people to fully exploit the
content of a site from Linux, PalmOS or OS X devices, and you're
cutting the value of the network as a whole. In Len's tightly coupled
world, that doesn't matter, so he should be a happy customer; but on
the Web it matters a lot, so don't expect kudos.
In principle, all this stuff should make software "better". On the
other hand, I'm happily typing this on an OS X system, that I paid for
because it is so much "better" in almost every sense than the Windows
system sitting next to it that my employer paid for ... and that's
after years and years of innovation with successive versions of
Windows, MFC, .NET, etc. I've stopped whining about Windows, and
started voting with my wallet in favor of better solutions. Maybe all
this Longhorn stuff will make Windows 2006 better enough than OS X 10.6
[or whatever] to make it worthwhile to switch back, but I'll believe
it when I see it.
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