Marc Canter tries to summarize Avalon, a forthcoming user interface technology in Microsoft's next OS Longhorn:
Avalon is an entirely new rendering model baked deep into the OS. It's Flash killer, HTML disintermediator.
Not that I doubt for a second that Microsoft is working on a Flash killer, but does anyone else see something deeply wrong here? How something that is baked deep into the OS could possibly be compared with technologies that are, basically, OS-agnostic? Shall we see this as yet another proof that those technologies are, indeed, a serious threat to the Windows OS monopoly?
François, why are you so reasonable in your writing? Why don't you just flail about frantically with your comments? Be a madman. You're the Padawan and Micro$oft is the Empire. The Evil Empire. Use. The. Force.
(and please don't point out the nonsensical nature of my comment. I already know I don't make any sense)
Cut loose man!
Let me see... May be it's because I moved the unreasonable writing on the French side of the Force, so my non-francophone readership doesn't have to pardon my French ;-)
Just for the padawan' record, Marc Canter is one of those people who think that Apple is the Evil Empire and colports pretty stupid examples about that faith (debunking of that idiocy by Master John Gruber at Daring Fireball).
Ah, okay, I'll move over to the other side right now. I'm expecting lots of French dammit!
Deeply wrong for who, and according to which perspective ?
This is not a technical judgement.
From Microsoft perspective it makes sense for their business, today, to embed all that stuff in the OS.
Maybe they will change that if the economic/social environment changes the profitability equation for their business: for example if Linux finally dents significantly their market share in desktop in the next 5 years, I'm sure they'll find a way to make this usable outside of windows.
I've taken a look at XAML: it's Mozilla's XUL for windows forms apps. I've always loved the idea of a declarative UI language, with scripting for behavior, that was implemented in XUL.
It's smart from Microsoft to have reused this design that was born in Mozilla.
From a technical perspective, good ideas come from everywhere: in Mozilla, XPCOM, the component model, was a simplified version of Microsoft's COM. Now Microsoft reuses the XUL idea.
From a pure technology perspective this makes me happy.
Now I agree completely with you that the fact that they embed this in the OS is a clear sign that they understand that comparable OS-agnostic standards based solutions are a competitor to their monopoly.
You can't blame them for fighting :-)
Let's see how standards and open source products evolve to compete with their new offering.
P@
> You can't blame them for fighting :-)
That's right. But I think I did tell you about my theory that because of Microsoft and its barricade defenses, the whole world has lost at least 10 years in technological progress :-)