[LINK] Microsoft is dead

[Jan Whitaker]

At 05:44 PM 7/04/2007, Kim Holburn wrote:
>Microsoft is dead:
>http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Interesting article from a big picture perspective.

This caught my attention:
Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped 
create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the 
XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser 
communicate with the server in the background 
while displaying a page. (Originally the only way 
to communicate with the server was to ask for a 
new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by 
Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it 
for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it 
would be useful to a lot of other people too—in 
fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

- Does that mean that ms holds the IP rights for 
that command? Are we just waiting for them to assert those 'rights'?

Jan


Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
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