The New York Times had an article yesterday entitled “Software Out There,” which discussed the whole “programmable web” movement that’s sprung up over the last couple of years. The author says that the internet is entering its “Lego” era.
It was actually a semi-interesting article, but I wish I could read an article in a major paper just once without cringing at the leaps of faith and hyperbole made by the author. Is it so hard to get an expert to look over an article before publication? The key example from this NYT article is this section (mid-way through Page 2):
Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web."
He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net.
At what point did .NET become a “proprietary alternative” to RSS or any other “standard for internet publishing”? Or vice versa?
But hey, why pass up the opportunity to put out something that seems semi-scandalous (“Imagine, a CTO for Microsoft using Firefox! Suggesting RSS as an alternative to .NET!”).