Andre’s Blog

The recently leaked Bill Gates memo about Web 2.0 and services and Microsoft’s strategy to revamp their offerings.  I can’t help but wonder if this is somehow at least partly in response to a recent AJAX article by AP than ran everywhere from Wired to CNN , including this quote:

“It definitely supports a Microsoft exit strategy,” said Alexei White, a product manager at Ajax developer eBusiness Applications Ltd.

Come on… let us small Vancouver software developers dream a bit;-)

Funny because the reporter really wanted a quote like that.  Funny because MS did really did allow AJAX to happen, however they did pretty much drop the ball after OWA, and have only recently jumped back on the band wagon.  And they are doing so in force with Atlas, Windows Live, and MSN Virtual Earth.

I believe they are on the right track now.  We share some views in the future needs of developers:

“Developers needing tools and libraries to do their work just search the Internet, download, develop and integrate, deploy, refine,” Ozzie wrote. “Speed, simplicity and loose coupling are paramount.”

These are the exact needs we aim to meet when building our AJAX component suite and developer tools.  Interesting the loose coupling mention as MS currently seems to taking an all MS or nothing stance for most of their developer tools.  However, historically Visual Studio was a better IDE to develop plug-ins but that may change with the new versions and focus of Eclipse.  We’ll see where things go, but it’s interesting times for sure.  Will MS shift course and continue to dominate, they likely can, or is the beginning the end of the MS empire?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.