Fix it in the mix III.
The Jim Allchin Tax
This is just code for the owner of the Microsoft crown jewels--in this case, the heart of the Office System, the Word text object. It could be Steve Sinofsky or Jeff Raikes who's directing the episode, but it's Allchin's franchise. From Bosworth to Lucovsky to Stutz, no-one has successfully challenged Allchin's hammerlock on the Windows value proposition.
Adam Bosworth created Trident, the Internet Explorer engine. Marc Lucovsky created Hailstorm, a Web services decomposition of the Exchange mail, calendar, and schedule engine. And David Stutz created Rotor, the standards-based .Net engine. Add these toold together and you should have been able to create a browser-hosted read-write tool for sharing and routing information.
But IE's edit control competed with Word, Hailstorm with Exchange (and eventually SQL Server) and .Net--well, with Windows. So after the Allchin Tax was applied, IE is now finally sucked into the OS where it belonged all along. Yukon will merge Exchange, SQL Server, and eventually the Windows FIle System, and .Net turns out to have been Windows all along.
We'll get the long-promised Universal Canvas, but sorry folks it will have to be Windows end to end. IE will finally get a credible edit control because it's now firmly part of the underlying OS. IE, Outlook, InfoPath and OneNote will converge into a powerful RSS information router for the Windows platform.
One small problem: not before 2005 or 6.
Steve, that's a long time. Way too long for those of us who see an RSS-aware container as not just a killer app but a killer platform. Not long enough to stop Sun and Apple from combining forces and bringing NetNewsWire, Rendezvous, Hydra, Safari/Mozilla, and the J2SE runtime together.
Of course, this scenario depends on the power of RSS to compress time and drive productivity in the exchange of ideas and information. It's the next step in iterative development: self-selecting groups of users and developers in a regenerative mesh network. Microsoft's RSS engineers are already hard at work--they need buy in from the leadership and a core authoring object that plays fair across the XML blogosphere.
[Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]
I really don't see Microsoft caring a bout us, RSS or what's good for everybody. They're on their own journey. God bless um.
Meanwhile because it will take YEARS before this Longhorny, .Net, Cairo, XML, SOAPy, Hailstorm, IE stuff to come out. Thank god. We'll have plenty of time to get our People's Mesh together. IBM will buy Sun, Apple will continue to evolve their brand - and say "fuck you" to everyone else - as well. I sure as hell wouldn't be waiting for them.
We're on our own.
My eldest son Aryeh (the Bar Mitzvah boy) just cooked me sausages, over easy eggs and heated up a quiche Lorraine. Now he's playing with his little sister Mimi (from Family 2.0) with his brother Jacob (the trumpet player.) It's a fine day here in SF - now we're onto the North Beach fair - then onto Berkeley for Patti Smith (thanks Lisa Rein for turning us onto that!)
