Microsoft’s X-Mas present (after an 18 month quiet time expires)
Hee Hee Hee
So here we were thinking that Ray Ozzie’s new Microsoft was a new beast, and that Google was the new evil empire in town - and they go and do THIS.
As Kevin Burton says “what were they thinking?” Conceivably this could be the same mistake that happened to AOL, where some lone researcher goes off and gets poo-poo all ovet the entire company’s face. Cause I don’t believe Ray Ozzie would have approved this application. Anyone can look at it and see the holes, theft and misconceived notions. That’s not who Ray is.
I was there at Gnomedex when these announcements were made.
I was struck at how cool it was that Microsoft was supporting RSS and I wondered what they’d try to do to change it into “their own”. They went and chanegd the little orange icon - from the ubiquitous XML or RSS orange tag, into this three striped thingie it is today.
“OK - harmless enough I thought.”
And I really liked the notion of a master RSS list, which multiple applications with the ‘Vista stack’ could access. “Hey! We all can acess that same list and have our own lists!” - I thought.
So now we watch and find out what’s gonna happen next? Will the EFF or Berkman or someone challenge this patent application?
Will Ray Ozzie rescend the application? Will this effect the overall status of the patent system in general?
Either way - we’ll have to wait until after the 1st of the year to find out. It certainly has heated up things - right before X-Mas. THis sort of stuff causes us all to join together. Kevin’s got prior art, lots of other folks as well.
And a Ho Ho Ho 2 U - 2!