Re: UKNM: The next stage in the game - ?????

[Tomski]

clay, am i allowed to kiss you in public?


At 14:43 01-09-99 -0400, you wrote:

> > How many people are now clued up on WAP, Open, Liberate et al? How

> > many people will be playing catchup in a year/month/week's time?

>

>No one.

>

>No one will be playing catchup in a week or a month or a year.

>

>We have been seeing, since 1995, company after company -- AOL,

>Marimba, Microsoft, @home, et al. -- announce that the Next Big Thing

>was coming, and that everybody who was using those boring old browsers

>and that boring old HTML was going to be playing catch up when their

>shiny new proprietary technology replaced all these silly open

>standards.

>

>It never happened, and its not going to happen any time soon. DHTML

>has not revolutionized the world, there's 10 times more Java on the

>server than the client, MSN did not eclipse AOL, and AOL itself

>reengineered to be less an online service than an fancy ISP, and guess

>what? I can *still* buy books on amazon using Netscape 1.22.

>

>The technological revolution has already happened - it took place in

>1994, with the public release of Mosaic 0.97. The revolution thats

>happening now is an economic revolution, but not a technological one.

>New devices must be designed to interoperate with the Web *as it

>esists today*, or they will die -- Open is doomed for this very reason

>-- since anyone who already interoperates with the web inherits a vast

>and expanding landscape, whereas anyone who announces new standards

>and new content creation tools will never acquire enough developers to

>make a dent in the existing infrastructure.

>

>-clay


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