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Gerald Bauer wrote:
> First to show off Microsoft's duplicity let's bring
>on some "innocent" Microsoft employees wondering why
>the Free World is outraged about XAML:
>
>
>
How threatening this all probably depends on your view on MS' long
term dominance of the Web. At the moment, it looks like MS will
lose government and education markets to Open Source steadily;
I expect that MS may be squeezed out (by low margins, piracy,
different cultural expectations about the value of intangibles like
software,
their loss of credibility on security, and especially
nationalist/anti-imperialist
considerations) of the East and South.
The combination of schools not using MS, Sony supplying a good
browser in PS3, and TVs and phones becoming smarter, may well reduce
MS' dominance in the home/student market as well. Military applications
tend to have a very long life, so MS cannot expect much truck from
the military away from supporting W3C/ISO/IETF standards-based formats.
Which leaves business, SOHO and office use, and it doesn't look
like XAML offers that much for SOHO. There is an economic
theory called the "Sales effect", which says that after a market
is saturated, sellers have to progressively spend more on
stimulating demand by advertising, pushing margins lower,
and on bottom-lining (spending more time on licensing and
anti-copying measures which risks alienate non-business
users more.) Maybe MS will find itself at that point during
this decade in some markets.
It will be very interesting to see how it plays out. Ten years
ago the company next to mine used to prominantly display
an already-old magazine cover saying "Unix is dead"...
I think the most reasonable attitude is to welcome XAML,
because it will provide more richness (think XUL), swear to
never use it when HTML/REST can be used (think Flash),
and just boycott browsers that don't implement W3C standards.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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