Linked by Adam S on Fri 11th Jul 2008 04:37 UTC, submitted by peskypescado
A recent post about Firefox and my general view of corporations and organizations has caused a bit of a stir. It even caught the attention of Asa Dotzler. He said "It's really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they're actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight." But are they really subverting it? Where exactly is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the web? I think the W3C should share in this blame.
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Member since:
2007-06-08
Being first in a market, gives you most of the time a big market share after stabilization of that market. And a big market share could be a de facto standard. Being the "owner" of the standard gives a company a competitive advantage. Even more so, if it's a closed standard (reverse engineering takes time). An open standard still gives an advantage, because the owner can more easily steer the standard in one direction.
Adobe did publish pdf (and now flash) as a standard, and opened the documentation. Again, they are doing this to hopefully gather industry wide support. This could then lead to a standard again. I think for example that PDF is the standard for electronic documents.
Microsoft tries to keep standards closed (or ambigue) and proprietary wherever they are the market leader. In other markets (e.g. pdf) they use the open standard strategy to erode the market power of the competition. And at the same time, they are showing their goodwill in supporting open standard. I'm still surprised that IronPython stays so extremely close to the "standard" Python. Normally, I would rather expect them to embrace and extend (remember Java) open stuff like that. I don't have much in the .NET market, but so far I know they remain a remarkably good citizen.
bye
rm
Edited 2008-07-11 16:14 UTC