Re: IE rebirth - A Publicity Stunt?

Hello,

> At this stage there isn't much
> more to add other than to reiterate the point that
> the Internet Explorer team does exist and does care.

  Sure. Microsoft cares about the future of the web.

  For a reality check allow me to quote Joel Spolsky
from an essay titled "How Microsoft Lost the API War -
Let's Make HTML Sing".

   Joel concludes:

  The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the
application development marketplace will be the people
who can make HTML sing.

   Joel on Internet Explorer:

  So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and
even without new web browsers we can probably get 95%
there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's
certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as
a web application.

  Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't
matter so much. Web applications don't require
Windows.

  It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was
happening. Of course they did, and when the
implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes.
Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were
stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team
seems to have disappeared; they have been completely
missing in action for several years. There's no way
Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better
than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their
core business, the rich client. The big meme at
Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the
company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere
in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda,
from the Avalon team, says that "Avalon, and Longhorn
in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying
that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting
there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're
investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place
to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of
excitement..."

 The trouble is: it's too late.

   More @
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html 

  Now tell us again why it is in Microsoft's interest
to undermine its Windows money machine?

  - Gerald

-------------------
Gerald Bauer

XUL Alliance        | http://xul.sourceforge.net  
United XAML         | http://xaml.sourceforge.net
The Thinlet World   | http://thinlet.blog-city.com


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Received on Monday, 21 June 2004 23:15:04 UTC