Simon’s Blog

Reading the various reviews around the world (see Scoble’s blog as a good jump-off point), I’m thinking: either most people don’t get it; or I’ve misunderstood what Microsoft is trying to do. Most people are saying things along the lines of “Is that it? The 37Signals/Apple/Konfabulator guys are doing a much better job” Whereas, to me, this looks like a pretty disruptive technology. And I haven’t seen many of those lately.

So why do I think it’s disruptive? Because I think they’re challenging the “conventional wisdom” that says everything should run in a web browser. The way I read Microsoft’s announcement (and I may have got it wrong - they haven’t been clear yet), is that they’re signalling their intent to make it easy to enable themselves and developers to build software services that integrate not only into a web browser (like everyone else is doing), but into the Windows desktop, and into rich Windows desktop and mobile applications (and Xbox 360?). And more than that, they’re going to have an ad system like Google’s. Except that Microsoft’s ad system won’t just work in a web browser. It will work in any application or desktop widget (again, this is just speculation - I don’t think they’ve said that it will).

The point is: writing high quality applications that run in a web browser is a pain, it’s error prone, the debug cycles are lengthy, and it’s difficult to support multiple browsers properly. So rather than Microsoft jumping on the AJAX bandwagon with both feet (as so many start-ups have done); they seem to be saying, “We think there’s a better way”…