Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web (eWeek) [LWN.net]

eWeek reports on Tim O'Reilly's prediction of a shift towards openness at Microsoft. "At the Web 2.0 Expo, Tim O'Reilly predicts that Microsoft will emerge as a leading proponent of the open Web, despite the company's tradition of fostering its own proprietary operating systems and development languages. O'Reilly says Microsoft's recent deals to index Twitter tweets and use Wolfram Alpha's APIs for computational data show a shift in its willingness to work with other Web companies. Moreover, the Windows Azure cloud computing operating system is designed to work with open-source technology."

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Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web (eWeek)

Posted Nov 20, 2009 7:34 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

No doubt that Tim is a smart person, but I'm not sure I'd quickly trust his judgment on the future of proprietary vs. open protocols. His defense of Safari Books Online's move to a Flash-based reader certainly didn't seem to jive with an understanding of the appeal of open standards:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a...

Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web (eWeek)

Posted Nov 20, 2009 17:36 UTC (Fri) by apolinsky (subscriber, #19556) [Link]

Though flash is a proprietary and far from ideal mechanism, it is one that is ubiquitous throughout the computer industry. The open source alternatives either don't work nearly as well, or are barely present in the user community.

Alan

Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web (eWeek)

Posted Nov 20, 2009 18:36 UTC (Fri) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

The alternative in this case was HTML, which worked much better on Safari for several years by any measure I can imagine: speed, clarity, cross-platform availability, stability, font rendering, bandwidth usage, ability to copy and paste code, et cetera.

Business connection

Posted Nov 20, 2009 19:13 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Don't forget that Tim O'Reilly was a director of Macromedia before Adobe acquired them.

Business connection

Posted Nov 20, 2009 22:37 UTC (Fri) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

I struggled to find a way to mention that in my post without sounding conspiratorial, but failed as my definition of "open" is somewhat more strict than "is a free download for Mac users too".

Tim's loved the idea of Rich Internet Applications and the Internet Operating System (both terms he has used) for a long time. I doubt he had much influence on the specific technologies used in Safari, however.