The looming battle between Old Economy (Microsoft) and New Economy
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Google and Microsoft are duking it out for developers' hearts and minds.  But is Amazon the wild card?
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New economy bigwig pays off a crusty old foe.
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com. Back in the mid-&#39;90s, they called it the Browser Wars: Netscape Navigator vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer. But that score was settled long ago, when America Online ironically bought
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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There are more signs that, at least in theory, the dominance of Microsoft&#39;s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows operating system may be slightly less potent than, say, a year ago this time.
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New versions of Office, Exchange, too. But are businesses ready to buy?
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The battle is on for your desktop. If it&#39;s anything like many previous computer wars, it will be fought with features as the primary weapons.
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SEATTLE/SAN FRANCISCO  - Next week's European antitrust ruling against Microsoft Corp  is a legacy of its past behavior, but competitors say the company's current strategy is a sign of history repeating itself.
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By Saul Hansell  There is a lot about the way Microsoft has run its Internet business that Steve Berkowitz wants to change. But he is finding it more difficult than he expected.
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Software giant Microsoft Corp.   sees the future and it is robots.
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The internet has dragged a âstuffy old businessâ into the 21st century.
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Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues.  This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future.  My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality â a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source. read more
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Operating system might help make up for a rough quarter and Microsoft nipping at the company's heels.
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Retrofitting SP2 to Windows 98 or Windows NT simply would not make much sense, argues Yankee Group&#39;s Laura DiDio. Both operating systems are eight years old, and the PC and Internet worlds were much different places then.
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A new battle in the multibillion-dollar online search war begins today as software giant Microsoft unveils a test version of its new search engine, looking remarkably like one of its chief rivals, Google.
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The longtime rivals claim that they&#39;ll work harder to make their software work together. By Aaron Ricadela. Longtime rivals Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have made a &quot;180-degree U-turn&quot; in their relationship
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The epic rivalry between Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is legendary. The original point of debate centered on which company was more integral to making PCs.