Ajax, Internet Explorer, Netscape, GMail and Outlook on the Web - the story of how to learn from your own past.

All the way through their anti-trust trial Microsoft were claiming the right to innovate, and everyone else was pointing out how little Microsoft actually innovated new ideas, and usually just purchased the new ideas.

The truth was probably somewhere in between the two. One case however where they really were guilty of total lack of innovation was with Internet Explorer, where they let it sit for years without touching it.

Irony 1

In the anti-trust trial, Microsoft were accused of killing Netscape with their desktop monopoly. Microsoft accused Netscape of killing themselves by failing to update their browser for ages.

Following the trial Microsoft copied Netscape by failing to update their web browser and so losing market share; Thus proving both that the were right (Netscape did contribute to their own decline) and that they are silly enough not to learn from their own recent past.

Why did Microsoft stop updating IE?

During the 90s they became worried that if you can do everything you need through a web browser, then you wouldn't need Windows. Linux+Firefox or MacOS+Safari would do just fine. So they wanted web browsers to be the poor relation of Windows.

However one area where Microsoft really did innovate during this time was the invention of the ActiveX control behind Ajax; this ActiveX control was created for Outlook-On-The-Web. They are just now starting to be rightly proud of an invention that really does alter the way the web works.

They didn't mean to fundamentally alter the web - all they meant to do was to write a cool web based e-mail program. But they did both.

Irony 2

The really big irony is that while they were arguing about how much they were innovating, they were having a policy of not innovating on the browser front at all. However while they were trying not to innovate they accidentally created an innovation that could end up killing the very thing that gave them the monopoly in the first place.

The fears of the 90s are starting to come true; partly thanks to Ajax, the Web is becoming a more successful platform than Windows is.

The irony meter is now pegged.

Irony 3

Ajax was made possible by an ActiveX control that enabled Microsoft to write a very cool web-based email program. Maybe they realized the potential of what they had created and decided to keep it quiet, or maybe they just forgot how cool it was, but the ActiveX control went very un-sung for a number of years until it was made famous by another web based email program - GMail.

I'm sure we'd call the script contrived if we read it in a book.

Robert Schoble

Nothing to do with Ajax, Netscape or Webmail, but everything to do with Microsoft and foot shooting; I noticed that Robert Schoble is moving his blog. It was hosted at weblogs.com, but it looks like he is going to Wordpress. Isn't that going to be a foot shooting? I wonder what percentage of his current subscribers will re-subscribe? Can the problem of where his feed is be solved using 302 redirects? Maybe he should be moving to an RSS redirection service like feedburner instead. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.