[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
On Nov 12, 2003, at 5:34 PM, Rod Davison wrote:
>
> So this means that Microsoft could come to its senses and come out and
> play
> nice with everyone else, but a little look at corporate anthropology
> suggest
> that we had better not hold our collective breath. Microsoft might
> change,
> they might realize that they market they dominated is transforming into
> something out of their control, and realign their strategies to
> something
> more reasonable – but it takes a wake-up call like IBM had when it got
> slapped around by the PC marketplace by an upstart company called
> Microsoft
>
Or that Microsoft got in 1995 got when Bill Gates realized that they
were in danger of missing the Internet boat. Avalon smells like
Blackbird 2006 to me. Before dismissing that as a mindless anti-MS
rant, read an August 1995 analysis [BillG's Internet epiphany was
announced on December 7]
http://www.imginc.com/IMG/What's+New/9.1.95.htm
"These and other inherent advantages stem in part from Microsoft's
design freedom with Blackbird: it's their product, and they aren't
bound by the de-facto standarditis that Netscape is with HTML and Tim
Berners-Lee's World-Wide Web (W3) consortium."
Read on -- MS is doing with Avalon *exactly* what the article says it
would have to do to make Blackbird a success: "For Blackbird to
duplicate in the interactive world the success VB's had on the desktop,
Microsoft will have to undertake a serious evangelization effort:
third-party encouragement, Blackbird conferences, Blackbird sessions at
TechEd and the like."
Deja vu all over again? We shall see if they pull it off this time.
Innovation is cool, and there is a lot to admire in the Longhorn
technologies. But interoperability and the network effect is the juice
that powers all this Internet stuff, and they need to be very careful
not to cut the cord.
|
