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I see a likely future where its not google and yahoo suing each other, but us. That is, suing those that choose to document the APIs/RSS extensions and create common libraries of them, to allow remixing and mashup.
Fwiw Dare is probably thinking clearly because he is at MSN, which is where innovation happens in near real time at Microsoft. One of the only places it does, these days.
The web is different from the "enterprise". Of course it is. But that is not to say business is different from the web, or the enterprise. Indeed I would argue distinctions are breaking down fast. Which is one reason we're quarrelling over minutae, - that is these issues are actually important to the web and the enterprise.
Actually its kind of odd, as an "IT industry analyst" focusing on the enterprise, I am less and less concerned about "enterprise" technologies. Look at the companies that outsource business processes to Amazon. One of my favourite examples is coming back from Microsoft Tech Ed in Copenhagen. I wanted a picture of bill gates. I found one for free, with suitable copyright waivers, in a about ten seconds on Flickr. Who needs an "enterprise" photo library.
Just so you don't get me wrong, I also happen to think MQSeries has a role to play in business, as does zSeries, SQL and other "enterprise" technologies. Its not they are hopeless so much as hypeless. They are about real-life, my "day job", what I have spent 10 years of my life learning. That doesn't make them any more "right" - or "wrong".
I am most excited by the intersections and convergences, though, rather than the polarities.
Enterprise/non-Enterprise distinctions also throw up weird politics. Thus Big Media Cartels are "enterprise", where IT firms selling to consumers aren't. is content enterprise or not?
We know whose business models are in the firing line...
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Goes a bit bonkers from here on: I think I feel a blog coming on
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The Enterprise is an anachronism. It's a spaceship flying through space where the captain can make individual decisions that will dictate the success or lack of it, of the enterprise. But we're not flying space ships guys, we're just not that self-sufficient or isolated. Maybe we need to think a lot more about the Federation, the Empire, or something. Just as no man is an island, no enterprise is a spaceship.
I mean the captain's log, Stardate whatever- surely it would actually be a massively subscribed blog - Kirk as the Scoble of the future, wheras in the TV show, it always seemed like he was just writing it for himself, and like a black box. Where was the comms.
Does anyone know about the origins of the term enterprise in corporate America - was it pre or post Star Trek.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 3:55 PM
To: Bill de hÓra
Cc: XML Developers List
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Something altogether different?
On 4/24/05, Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@propylon.com> wrote:
> Probably pretty much any communications activity with third-parties
> that has normally been done (suboptimally) using email is candidate
> for re-architecting to a web style. Heck I bet somebody will end up
> running a photo business or a graphic design house on flickr some day.
>
What Dare actually said was "What Bosworth is pointing out is that the Web is different from 'the enterprise'. XML technologies over the past few years have been hijacked by enterprise concerns. It is telling that XQuery is now primarily being driven by relational database vendors and WS-* is basically taking on the use cases of DCOM/CORBA/etc for the Enterprise. These may all be the right solutions on the intranet or within the firewall (maybe) but they are too complex for the worse-is-better world that is the Web.Using RSS as the primary data format for the Web (in the same way HTML is the primary document format) isn't as crazy as it sounds."
Which part of that do you disagree with, Bill?
Bosworth's point was that the Web is built out of simple and sloppy standardized stuff that scales. Dare thinks that RSS appears to meet enough of these criteria such that it's not as crazy as it sounds to
think of it as "HTML for Data". The part I'm most skeptical about is
"standardization" -- how will people agree on on tags, microformats, namespaces, etc. whatever needed to extend RSS to cover restaurant reviews, product catalogs, etc. etc. etc.?
The obvious answer is that what Google (especially Froogle) looks for
in markup, Father Darwin will deliver. Google seems to be pretty
cagey about what Froogle wants to see, but (sooo-prise soo-prise
soo-PRISE) there is already a cottage industry wanting to help you with Froogle optimization. cf.
http://www.subiainteractive.com/froogle-prep.html If online stores
and services that play by the explicit or implicit rules of the "HTML for Data" format, they will get more customers than those who don't.
If MSN and Yahoo understand and play by the same rules as Google, it's hard to imagine what would stop this thing.
The obvious counter-argument is that it's RSS we're talking about here
:-) Religious wars over minutiae seem the order of the day. Not to mention the fact that IP could rear its ugly little head here -- if Yahoo and Google start suing each other over "their" RSS extensions,
it's all over. I guess I'm coming around to Dare's point of view --
this sounded absurd to me a couple of days ago, but now I can easily imagine this coming into being as long as it doesn't get derailed by what Dogbert calls the strongest force in the universe.
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