So that is what Microsoft says it is.
Do you believe them?
Take for instance the item in there about building block
experiences. Their login piece already has been described.
They call it
Hailstorm.
Now to hear them talk about it, it is going to be the best
thing since sliced bread.
However this is the company that does its best to wipe out
everyone else by fair or foul means. It has repeatedly
wound up in anti-trust court, generally for good reason.
As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool
me twice, shame on me.
I do not trust Microsoft.
In fact here are my
thoughts
on what Hailstorm is intended to accomplish. This is not
a company that is known for doing a good job on keeping
data secure or private. Its track record is, in fact,
abysmal. I would be willing to lay money that if its
strategy takes off that in a few years everyone will be
complaining about its abuses of the power that it grabbed
with .NET.
Besides which, Microsoft's claims to portability
notwithstanding, their strategy has always been to make
their own platform the first among equals. .NET will,
promises notwithstanding, be a Microsoft first platform.
Given how Microsoft has abused every other standard to
achieve lock-in, what makes us think that they will do
differently this time?
And when it comes to portability, well .NET is a new VM,
and Perl on .NET will have new and different bugs from the
current. Glancing at what ActiveState
has
to say, their initial idea of compiling Perl in the .NET
runtime was too slow. (Perl is a VM, on a VM?) Instead
they have a cryptic comment about a native implementation
having to wait for progress on Perl 6.
Given the design of Perl 6 into a front and back end, I
suspect that this means that they are intending to try to
map Perl opcodes as much as possible onto .NET primitives
and get their own .NET implementation. I am sure that
such an implementation will turn out to have behaviour
differences from the usual. This is on top of the usual
bugginess that I expect from Microsoft products.
Oh well. At least ActiveState gets some money for this
work. And Microsoft's hopes notwithstanding, my belief
is that Microsoft is not in the same position that they
used to be to force things down the throats of industry.
Unless they do something interesting, fast, they will lose
hope of locking down the embedded industry, and I think
that networked devices (which are rapidly heading towards
Linux) are going to be a lot bigger area of growth than
PCs... |