Another Belated Microsoft Memo 232
fiannaFailMan writes "Bill Gates has sent out another memo heralding the latest big development in the industry, as he sees it. This time it's web-based software using technology such as AJAX (that MS 'invented but failed to exploit'). The Economist says 'As in previous cases, what is new is not the idea itself, but the fact that Microsoft is taking it seriously.' Zach Nelson of NetSuite decided against writing a memo. 'Writing memos is cheap,' he says, whereas 'writing software is a whole lot harder.'"
Who owns it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Web 2.0? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats the scary part...
Gregor
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I felt that age of simple web pages slipped away when javascript started becoming popular.
Now to be a web developer its gotten to the point that its difficult to know fewer than 3-4 languages. And its nearly on par with desktop development; but soon will be the day when desktop and internet will be seamless.
Re:Who owns it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:5, Interesting)
But I've implemented a few shiny upgrades to older web apps that we run, and people love 'em, and want AJAX in everything. There are a few applications that we maintain that make significant use of JavaScript, and people want to 'upgrade' the JS to AJAX. I've explained over and over again that AJAX is just a particular thing that you can do with JS, it's not something that you replace JS with.
AJAX is a really cool development method, but it's like any other tool--there are certain situations where it helps, and others where you just don't need it.
Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just imagine how...status quo or diminished...Microsoft would be if they weren't intentionally five years late to the party. Seriously.
5 or 6 years ago Microsoft was hugely pushing a lot of very advanced web technologies, including remote scripting, behaviours, client-side XML data islands and heavily programmatically controllable transformations, and even the much-maligned ActiveX. These enabled some remarkable web applications (ActiveX, for instance, allowed you to have auto-updating rich client on the desktop, but retaining all of the advantages of the document model of HTML).
It really was a fantastic platform that they created, and they were light years ahead of everyone else. Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites, but for internal teams that were up on their chops (most aren't, unfortunately), there were some amazing solutions created.
However Microsoft has a so-called-problem that shops like Salesforce don't - they are pulling in billions upon billions a year from their, err, "legacy" products, and often they're their own biggest competitor. The last thing they want to do is pull the carpet out from under their cash cows and enter into a new competition as a new entrant of sorts, eliminating a huge source of income, and a competitive advantage. It's for this reason that the IE team was disbanded years ago, after they shot far ahead of everyone else.
The revisionist history where people imagine that Microsoft is behind because they're just not as advanced as their competitors really is laughable. Microsoft was a mile ahead and then decided they really wanted to run the 20K instead of the 100m.
Conflict (Score:4, Interesting)
Take MS vs. Google. Now Google still IMHO does everything before MS, and then MS goes "me too" and issues something similar but yet worse than Google offering. In normal situation - meaning MS has no money to pump from OS/software revenue into new markets they would not get a chance against Google - they will simply bankrupt. Right now they pump the money but I doubt they get any revenue (even to go on zero line) from their web services.
Now as far as I understand they wan't to couple web-based software (more like service) with shrink-wrappedsoftware like Windows and Office. I base that on various interviews with MS execs about MS product line I've read. But this is like flawed idea from the begining. The most valuable part (IMHO) about web software is that it only needs a browser and server infrastructure on the other end. So in fact you do not need to pay any special attention to the client side (as you would have to with shrink-wrapped software). So for e.g. you could have a big extranet with 5000 clients across the world, using one sophisticated application by web and only thing you need is decent server architecture and on client side - commodity: standard browser running on any OS, maybe a printer or smth. to get the job done.
This is completely the opposite of having fat clients loaded with bloated OS and software suites - the MS way.
So I see a conflict here.
AJAX good for large services , not small (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:3, Interesting)
As a user who has had to endure every application being a web application, even if it never needed to be, you're not going to get my sympathy. You're part of the group that created this problem.
I've got no problem with distributed applications, but the idea that everything should be HTML/CSS/Javascript sitting in front of a database is just wrong.
Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)
Er, "behind" and "less advanced" are synonymous.
If anything that's backwards. Microsoft sprinted to get halfway decent Javascript and XML support, and then decided they'd won the race and stopped dead. There hasn't been an Internet Explorer rendering engine update for over four years now.
Meanwhile, Gecko/Presto/KHTML have made steady progress and had the majority of the capabilities of what will be in Internet Explorer 7 years ago. Microsoft have acted like the hare racing against the tortoise - arrogant enough not to take the competition seriously, and have been overtaken while they weren't looking.
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now they have flat, nested, no comments, and threaded.
Take something like threaded, then instead of refreshing the whole page when you drill down, just the pull down the comments for that thread.
I hate AJAX (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft invented AJAX? (Score:0, Interesting)
Even further, they don't even support it correctly. XmlHttpRequest is a standard object in E4X (an ECMA standard), but IE supports it only via an ActiveX Object instance.
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:1, Interesting)
They can try, but they aren't erecting any sky-scrapers just by thinking differently.
Writing code.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not use Java applets? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that Sun missed the boat on this one. Instead of working on a lightweight JVM for every platform, they kept bloating the language and the implementation. I don't see many Java applets anymore, it's mostly Flash and now AJAX.
Re:I thank M$ (Score:2, Interesting)
As the major advantage of 'AJAX' is that doesn't need that stuff, I guess you could say they invented AJAX...except for the actually useful part of it working cross-platform and transparently. Because of this rather obvious limitation, it failed to actually be used anywhere except intranets.
Part of this wasn't MS's fault, as it was pre-standard DOM, IIRC.
Any idiot can create interesting web technology that operates within a single browser. The power of AJAX is that libraries let it transparently Just Work, to steal an MS slogan.
And once Javascript got standardized enough that you could replace parts of the webpage live, on any browser (Giving us dHTML), the 'And we can edit the page with data from the server' is not an incredibly large conceptual leap. All major browsers, at that point, had some sort of XML parsing support inside their Javascript, so the obvious idea that you give out the same XML to any client, and rely on their Javascript to parse it, was also rather obvious.
In sort, I don't think AJAX really was any sort of innovation. It's just cross-platform DHTML with an XML data channel. Pretending MS invented it five years ago is ignoring the 'cross-platform dHTML' part.
Re:Who owns it? (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, the utility of this patent has to do with backwards compatibility with OSes that only understand the 8.3 file format, which nobody gives a shit about anymore. However, the particular way that long filenames are kludged into VFAT are now cast in concrete, and any implementation is stuck infringing the patent claims regardless of whether anybody will ever access the 8.3 filenames. In other words, the patent no longer has any valid technical use other than creating market barriers and collecting licensing revenue.
Re:AJAX and Comet (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that goes right to the heart of why I hate web development. Each of the languages of web design are poky little scriptlets, weak beyond belief, so that to actually *do* something, you need three or four just to get you through it. It's really saying something when you needed four languages to design the page that your web browser displays, but you only needed one to write the web browser itself.
The web needs to be torn down and rewritten from scratch. Start with ONE language that does EVERYTHING, all with the SAME SYNTAX ON EVERY LINE. Not doing this part with a C-style curly brace here, and that part with an HTML-style angle-bracket there, and using twenty different commands in ten different dialects to do the same thing. Web source is starting to look like Perl on acid.
constantly (Score:4, Interesting)
In general, merely having a patent stifles progress and is an anti-competitive practice because it forces competitors to work around it, in particular given that Microsoft has threatened to enforce its portfolio and clearly has the means to do it.
Microsoft also uses its patent portfolio to negotiate patent cross licensing agreements and they use patents in the negotiation of individual business deals. And Microsoft uses patents to threaten countersuits when they are threatened with a legitimate patent lawsuit, usually resulting in a cross licensing deal and settlement.