At 11:46 PM 11/7/98 +1100, Hamish Moffat wisely observed: >He makes the point that IBM developed Token Ring to decommodize Ethernet. >That may be true, but Token Ring was a better system than Ethernet. As >MCA is/was better than ISA. Both of these lost out because they required >licensing. Is there any sign that Microsoft's protocols are actually >better than the open equivalents? > The ongoing story of Java, 'embraced and extended' by Microsoft may be the best sign of how their next de-commodization project will go. The author of the Pulpit web page, referred to earlier in this thread, details how MS Java extensions had insidious effects on applications written inside the standard.
IMHO, the typical personal home page writer does not care as much about adherence to a standard as getting the neatest effects. If 'HTML with MS extensions' has animated 3-D GIFs, _and_ if standard HTML GIFs suddenly take on a strange spatial separation of red and blue, _and_ if the casual home page writer thinks, 'what the heck, 99% of my visitors are on Windows anyway,' then the commodity of the standard begins to be ignored in favor of the propietary de-facto standard. If MS is successful at 'embracing and extending' Java, then HTML, TCP/IP and the OSS world will soon feel the suffocating arms of MS wrapped around them. mctech "In the history of great ideas and great innovations, there is not a single accountant in the list."
