Not everyone is cheering about RSS integration into Windows Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. With the event of making RSS a native format for Longhorn, many software developers whom make stand-alone feed readers are crying out that Microsoft is once again shutting down a sector of business which in all respects is somewhat true. With the complete integration of the format within the OS, there is no need of stand-alone feed readers. Flexbeta has a nice write up about what MS is trying to accomplish with RSS integration into the OS.
No need? So there is no need for other media players, browsers, im clients?
Please. All this does is make things easier for developers and changes almost nothing else.
Well, what are the dominant media players, browsers and IM clients on a Windows platform? Funnily enough, they’re the ones that come with the platform. Bundling things like this doesn’t entirely kill off 3rd-party apps, but it makes it a lot harder to compete.
Given the simple equation A+B=C, if is A is true and B is true then C must be true. If A is false and B is true then C is false……
If we work backwards with that equation, and we assert that C is true therefore A and B must also be true are we deluding ourselves?
It is only when we presume that C is false because either A is false and or B is false that we do not stand prone to an assumptive error.
If we change up the equation so that it reads B+C=A we find that there is no way that it can be a true statement, therefore A+B≠C
yep, for certain the calculation breaks… ≠ is supposed to be “does not equal”. Proof the assertion is false!!!
Of course the most worrying possibility is that M$ wont really get on all that well with plain old RSS and instead devise their own slightly different version of it, and if longhorn takes off in a big way that’s enough leverage to make people use it.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050626
does anyone know one single *commercial* rss reader? so what market is it supposed to destroy. oh come on, if ms doesn’t includes tools it is bad because it doesn’t come packed like a linux distro, if it comes with apps it is bad because it destroys markets. decide please.
besides, does anyone realy thinks realplayer would be the standard mediaplayer on windows today if ms would not have included wmp? realplayer has such a tiny marketshare becaus it simply sucks, that won’t change with antitrust fillings.
I think its kinda stupid to flame MS for including tools in its OS. Everyone thinks that its great that many mainstream Linux distros install with a tool for practically everything. But if MS does it, its critisized.
I *do* believe MS should be critisized, but *not* for including the tool. MS should be critisized for not making tools optional or (easily) removable. There is no reason a browser/firewall/antivirus/media player (and now RSS Reader) shouldn’t be *integrated* into the OS. If I buy windows, I shouldn’t be *FORCED* to install/run MS tools.
“does anyone know one single *commercial* rss reader?”
and on top of that, it’s incredibly easy to write your own reader if you don’t want to pay for one (of course there are dozens of free ones as well). People just want something to bitch about, anytime MS bundles anything all the tin foil hats reappear. Makes me absolutely sick, don’t these people have better things to do?
Actually, WinAMP and iTunes both have a wider user base than WMP, and AIM certainly has more users than Windows/MSN Messenger.
IE won the wars because it was flat out blew everything else out of the water at the time, not because it was bundled.
“does anyone know one single *commercial* rss reader?”
FeedDemon: http://www.feeddemon.com
Anyway, so if MS doesn’t include an RSS tool, then maybe they should remove the browser, IM client, media player, file manager, and text editor too.
BTW: Doesn’t Apple include RSS capabilities in OSX? How many people were bitching about that?
Okay, IE will support RSS news feeds. This is hardly news.
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RSS is happening without Microsoft. I grabbed this article through Safari’s built-in RSS reader. That’s how I track most RSS-enable sites these days.
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So … good to see Redmond catching up. I’m sure Microsoft’s mass will encourage more RSS browsing, which is a good thing. But you’d think Microsoft would almost be embarrassed they’re well behind the adoption curve on an emerging technology. Again.
Why shouldn’t MS “integrate” (whatever that really means) RSS into Windows? It’s a new technology that Windows needs to stay current. People like the all-or-nothing approach of Windows. If given an option to install something called “RSS Tools”, 99 of 100 people wouldn’t know what “RSS Tools” means. Tell them, though, that Windows can automatically update news headlines, sport scores, and stock info and they’ll say “Yes”.
People who think it is important to know about specific tools install Linux. People who don’t install Windows. The numbers of who does what ought to tell you something.
Nobody uses AIM outside the US so yes, MSN is the most widely used out there.
im outside us and i use aim and don’t like msn (don’t trust passport thingie)
MSFT can integrate an RSS reader into IE. There is nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong is that MSFT is once again Extending a Standard for their own personal use.
I mean come on how many times does MSFT have to extend a standard and warp it before people will stop letting MSFT walk all over them. IE comes right to mind.
MSN Messenger doesnt come with windows
Windows messenger does, and its horribly outdated and pretty useless. Yeah it’s just an msn messenger client, but very few people actually use it.
There have been proposals but not official “standard” on RSS yet.
Most of the implementations have been compatbivle with each other.
Interestingly enough all of the standards that have been proposed document the ability for extensions to be added.
I don’t see the problem with what MS is doing myself.
If MS has to integrate RSS into one of its products it’s Outlook and Outlook Express, not IE. What does IE, a popular browser, have to do with RSS?
RSS should be displayed like e-mails in OE. Opera integrated its RSS reader the same way it integrated Usenet Newsgroups into its popular e-mail client and has had much positive feedback on its forum.
Firefox has an integrated RSS reader, but the news are displayed as hidden bookmarks, what’s the point? I never remember to have a look at them. What a mess!
It’s not like this is some proprietary extention, it has been licensed with CC-BY-SA, which means you are free to copy, re-distribute, make derivatives of, and make commercial products based on it.
Are you saying that Microsoft isn’t aloud to write an extension (which others have done in the case of RSS) to anything? Microsoft isn’t aloud to add to something already available?
I don’t think I’ve ever used Thunderbird’s RSS aggregation capability, which is similar to the one you mentioned. Plenty of Mac users use Safari’s RSS reader, which seems to be very similar to the new IE7 one. (At least from looking at the screenshots.) And Firefox’s works nicely too, in a minimal way. I put “Live Bookmarks” into my personal toolbar so I can check headlines by clicking on the source website from the toolbar.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t see this as the same as what happened with Internet Explorer or any other embrace and extend techniques. They are taking RSS adding stuff to it and then releasing the changes under the same license at RSS is under. So if I understand correctly, they are documenting what makes their version better and if it’s popular and it’s actually used then everyone else is free to duplicate it. What’s the problem?
who uses IE anyway it would be just a API for who develop RSS reader other then that just a new IE ability it wont change anything.
MS is developing it’s own AntiVirus
MS is developing it’s own AntiSpy/Adware
MS is trying to change the RSS format to it’s own gain.
When MS announced it was making a antivirus product AV companies stock tanked and IIRC is still lower than before the announcement.
The same could be said again when MS announced it’s own “Free” adware tools.
MS should only be in the OS business. It’s okay to market these other things as addon’s for a price but they’re adding these things for free and intergrating them to the point it makes other products less functional if it had not been there in the first place.
3rd party software makers have reason to be pissed off. They built the RSS market and now MS wants to profit off their backs.
A/V & adware apps are directly related to OS’s, so MS has a pretty good reason to get into this market. Nothing is stopping, say…Symantec from writing their own OS and bundling it with their A/V software.
In the case of RSS (which is nothing more than a spec written around an XML format), it’s a very simple spec so what’s the big deal? MS built SOAP (another XML based spec) and gave it to the community…funny how no one complained about that.
sure it hurts 3rd party apps. Ofcourse it does. But It’s microsoft’s OS. Linux distros come with a set of software that is widely popular regardless if there is something better.
All OS;s did it. BeOS had NetPositive, Apple has Safari and MS has IE…. Everyone flipped out when IE came on windows but not for everything else.
I agree with those not anti-MS.
And for the ‘extending standard’: if websites won’t use it, changes will be useless
otherwise, it means they added something useful.
Anyone remembers that MS Java extensions allowed more than 8kHz sound for example? Holy Standard Java didn’t, at the time…
Btw, my SE T610 mobile extends MIDP1.1 with features of MIDP2. So I can hear sound in apps.
Btw, almost every Nokia mobile has (good) extensions that make apps written for them incompatble to every other mobile brand. Anyone of the yelling ppl with a Nokia?
i say let them do it…
you always have the option to install your own ish.. ( although i must admit it would be a nice change to install windows without all the extra crud )
if MS didnt do anything about the viruses and spyware, people would still throw hissy-fits.. so i say let them do it..
the one problem i see about all those bundled and integrated apps that come with windows isnt so much that they are there but that its a pain in the ass (even with that added defaults tool that ms added after one of those lawsuits) to get another program to take over all the tasks of a bundled program. yes some of the problems are related to the programs but there are still times when the integrated ms apps seems to get priority before my defaulted apps.
and i cant say i have realy understood rss yet. yes i have the sage extention for firefox and yes i have a bunch of rss links added. i guess the thing is that it should realy be running in the background, allways updating and then poping up a polite icon when a new item have arrived. its a allways on kinda thing it seems. just like mail is best when you can leave the mail software in the background, allways checking for new stuff.
hmm, maybe ill try the rss plugin for miranda and use that to look up my feeds
Not that I see a point to RSS, and think they could work on other things, the point still remains, they are doing what they should be doing. Adding more function into their product. As a consumer, I want to see a company like MS continue to add to the product. If they made just an OS and left it at that, it would be a pretty bad product, and go the way of BeOS.
They are doing the same as apple is doing. Nothing wrong with that. In a ideal world I would be able to put in my OSX or Windows CD and every app I need/want is there out of the box. Of course some of them aren’t that great on both platforms right now, but others are fine, in time maybe both companies will get things right with all their apps. It’s about being pro consumer.
And to who mentioned winamp, winamp died when itunes came out. Itunes might be bigger then WMP on windows, but that’s debatable, lots of people still use WMP cause it’s really not that all bad. Certainly became a lot better then winamp during the Winamp 3 phase.
Could someone explain the difference between RSS and that “Pull” thing that MS and Netscape talked so much about around the time for Windows 95? or was it 98… I forget.
Ever since I first read about RSS I’ve been thinking that it’s just a modernization of an idea that never took off when it was first attempted. Am I wrong?
RSS is an extensible standard. You can easily extend it to your needs. You don’t need to change the basics, but you can add your own fileds, features to it without changing the rss standard itself. You can use namespaces to do it, and that’s all. If they want to do something unique, they can do it with different namespaces.
MS putting any kind of technology in its OS, as long as all modifications to the underlying protocols are open. What I’m against modifications covered by patents or trade-secrets, even if they are useful. Otherwise we’ll soon see RSS feeds “designed only for MS RSS reader” akin to IE-only sites, owners of which simply don’t care, because “everybody uses Windows”. We don’t want MS to control RSS, do we?
those lamers complaining about ms including IE, wmp and now, perhaps rss should be shot, when people buy an OS, they sure as hell expect to get a browser and a media player.. i could understand if they started bundling large application suites like office, advanced 3d applications and such stuff.
Try nntp/rss. It will run a local news-server that you can connect to using any compatible client (even Outlook ExpresS)
The problem with Windows adopting any technology is that it will become the target for virus writers and crackers.
Nobody uses AIM outside the US so yes, MSN is the most widely used out there.
I guess you forgot that all the Mac users using iChat are essentially using AIM servers.
BTW: Doesn’t Apple include RSS capabilities in OSX? How many people were bitching about that?
No one, because
a) Apple is not a Monopoly
b) Everyone who used to pay for a good RSS reader (I didn’t because there are other good ones out there for free), will continue to do so, because Safaris RSS implementation really isn’t that great.
I think its kinda stupid to flame MS for including tools in its OS. Everyone thinks that its great that many mainstream Linux distros install with a tool for practically everything. But if MS does it, its critisized.
The day Microsoft includes office as part of windows for no additional cost I will believe on that argument ant stop critizising them for it.
But note that the only tools they add to windows are of technologies they do not/want to control, and once they control the technology they allow the included ‘tools’ to stagnate.
They will probably destroy RSS.
In Europe, MSN is probably the most used IM protocol. AIM is non-existant here. And in my country, The Netherlands, MSN has a 100% market share. The other two big ones are ICQ and Jabber.
I guess you forgot that all the Mac users using iChat are essentially using AIM servers.
That’s the exact reason why iChat is a completely useless outside the US. They boast about all the cool features, yet it only features AIM and Jabber. I asked Apple once to include MSN support, but never got a reply back.
In Europe, MSN is probably the most used IM protocol. AIM is non-existant here. And in my country, The Netherlands, MSN has a 100% market share. The other two big ones are ICQ and Jabber.
The other two big ones *in Europe*, I mean.
yeah, like they destroyed html… oh come on, rss is such a fragmented standard that there isn’t anything to spoil anyway. besides, afaik it is obligatory to open modifications to rss. it is not like they could keep em secret anyway.
>Nobody uses AIM outside the US so yes,
>MSN is the most widely used out there.
here in germany the most widely used im clients are icq and miranda. aim is quite known and used as well.
“Why shouldn’t MS “integrate” (whatever that really means) RSS into Windows? It’s a new technology that Windows needs to stay current. People like the all-or-nothing approach of Windows. If given an option to install something called “RSS Tools”, 99 of 100 people wouldn’t know what “RSS Tools” means. Tell them, though, that Windows can automatically update news headlines, sport scores, and stock info and they’ll say “Yes”. ”
As much as a Linux fan I am, I still cant disagree with the statement. All those years Linux distros had those RSS readers but now MS will steal the limelight saying we have automatic headlines, stock info, sport scores, blog entries, ready for you to read!!
It is all about marketing, seriously! and Good Marketing.
Even India’s leading daily carried a report on it, even though RSS is nothing new to report out, but the way MS markets stuff is commendable in some ways.
A/V & adware apps are directly related to OS’s, so MS has a pretty good reason to get into this market. Nothing is stopping, say…Symantec from writing their own OS and bundling it with their A/V software.
That excuse can be tailor-made to any piece of software and hence invalid, if so, what MS should do is to simplify windows so spyware can be identified and removed easily, there are so many undocumented dark corners on windows that even them have a hard time (rootkits).
In the case of RSS (which is nothing more than a spec written around an XML format), it’s a very simple spec so what’s the big deal? MS built SOAP (another XML based spec) and gave it to the community…funny how no one complained about that.
MS gave not much to the comunity, XML-RPC, BXXP were already there. If they gave it away it is surely because they did not see a way to use it as a weapon.
If MS is so keen on being good they have a good chance to be , they just have to update winXP on SP3 in a way in which IE (and the rest of the internet tools) are made optional and can be uninstalled easily.
Me thinks not that MSN is the most used chat… I don’t know if there is one most used chat client. However, I do know that SKYPE has become EXTREMELY popular, and many people use it for chatting.
“IE won the wars because it was flat out blew everything else out of the water at the time, not because it was bundled.”
*LOL*
And it has nothing to do that it came bundled? Funny, because on MacOS, where IE4 normally was offered alongside with Netscape, it never became the leading browser.
And how do you explain the market dominance of IE nowadays?
According to your superiority theory, IE shouldn’t be present at all because it has lost it’s lead a long time ago. So why is it still the dominant browser?
Market dominance of IE is of course related to bundling and tying software to the OS (you can’t call something you can’t remove “bundling”, can you?).
It has been proven numerous times that people don’t care about technical superiority. The masses are lazy and most of them will use whatever comes preinstalled especially under Windows where Software installation is a pain in the ass compared to cleanly architectured systems and especially since IE and the IE icon manages to pop up all the time despite changing the default and removing the icon from the desktop.
Of course it is! That’s something that MS has understood all along, while open source developers think it is a dirty word.
Look at most of the comments here. They’re written from the point of view of open source developers (mostly wannabe’s, I suspect). Old arguments about the evils of “embrace and extend” and laments about the future of 3rd-party developers are trotted out. But, look around, how many people have been paying attention? The only people who would choose a software products based on their concern about such issues are geeky open source clones. And, that’s fine. Just don’t fail to notice that the other 98 percent of the human race doesn’t care and is doing something different.
It is the product that counts, not the ideology of the people who built it. Rather than whine about MS and RSS, the Linux community ought to asking itself why it couldn’t get itself organized enough to “integrate” RSS a year ago and score all the PR. (That would’ve required speaking with a single voice and getting the distributions and Gnome and KDE, etc., to all agree to do the same thing at the same time — something Linux is woefully unable to do.)
IE WAS much better than everything else at the time it came out. It was one of the fastest browsers you could get, for one.
And also, software installation is WAY easier in Windows than in Linux. Macs are the best, hands down.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/06/25/security_the_missing_i…
Microsoft is adding RSS to WINDOWS itself … just like my documents or my music or any of those features.
and Microsoft is trying to HELP developers … they are not trying to mononpolize the market.
The extensions they are adding are good ones, like list-support.
classic rss is time based but things like wishlists are not so they wanted to add support for them.
also they didn’t wan’t for every rss developer to have to reinvent the wheel … so what if i want to write an rss app i don’t have to care about 0.91 or 1.0 or 2.0 or 2.0+ms i ca just write my app against their framework … the rss integration is simply a usefull example of how extensible the rss platform in windows will be.
channel 9 is great for seeing these things from the developers side.
they where ahead of their times, and i guess it was based on prorietary binary solutions (and therefor ie could not access netscape stuff and so on).
allso, rss fits nicely into the allways on internet world that dsl and cable have given us.
finaly, this is still pull, only that you can now set the software to go out, look for changes and then report back. earlyer versions that did so would have to look at the whole website and would maybe miss something or trigger on the change of a gif banner being replaced.