Lotsa laughs

[Mark Birbeck]

Steve Oldmeadow wrote:
> Microsoft have captured the hearts and minds of many people 
> who do not want
> to hear anything bad about Microsoft and these people don't 
> care about open
> standards.  To paraphrase one Microsoftian I was talking to 
> "I just want
> products that work together".  A lot of people have been burned by
> incompatibilities between products using alleged "Internet" 
> standards and
> are now moving back to a one vendor solution.

Having trouble keeping up with the incredibly profound depth of this
discussion, but am I right in saying that anyone who "wants products
that work together" is licking the backside of Bill Gates? Helping his
"death-ray"? Phew. Lighten up guys.

Someone needs to do BizTalk, or its equivalent - right? If someone else
does it, fine - can't say I'll lose much sleep either way. But are
businesses who want to exchange data going to start subscribing to this
mailing-list? Are they going to monitor xmlschema.com every day? And
what of the people who service them? Like it or not, they have probably
got more chance of getting up to speed with XML via some of the samples
and tools on the Microsoft XML site, than they have by listening to what
passes for debate on this list.

Anyway, why the panic? One interesting consequence of XML is that
companies will become less dependent on software vendors, rather than
more. In fact, with industry-specific data interchange formats you could
keep using your old COBOL system to handle your data and still transmit
it to someone else using the flashiest new stuff. (No offence to COBOL
programmers intended.) Two years ago it was not at all clear that that
was an option, and people were writing ODBC and JDBC and this and that
to get data communicating with data.

Or have we forgotten all that?

Just as the Internet did before, XML presents an opportunity for people
with something interesting to say to go out and make a splash. In fact,
I think there is even more room in this field than there was before. But
if they don't make this splash then Microsoft will. And whose fault's
that?

Regards,

Mark

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