Too little too late, or the IE standards ambush all over again?
Microsoft Draws Cheers, Jeers over RSS in Longhorn
June 24, 2005
Matt Hicks [eWeek]SEATTLE—Microsoft’s vision for tying RSS directly into the next release of Windows drew cheers and jeers among the syndication-feed enthusiasts gathered here Friday.
It drew accolades for its potential to smooth some of the user kinks in discovering and managing feed subscriptions, while it awakened fears that the Redmond, Wash., software maker is attempting to embrace the still-emerging market for syndication feeds in order to dictate its direction.
One reaction appeared constant among attendees at Lockergnome.com’s Gnomedex 5.0 conference being held through Saturday: By promising to make RSS more accessible across Windows applications, Microsoft is shifting the syndication-feed landscape away from just reading blogs and news.
“It’s another step toward putting RSS in the mainstream,” said Marc Strohlein, a vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc. “It definitely cements RSS as a content transport mechanism.”
Microsoft Corp. has had good reason to announce its major RSS push at Gnomedex. Talk about RSS and related technologies such as Weblogs and Podcasts is as common here as chatter about flight delays at the airport.
The core of Microsoft’s RSS plans is to bring feeds into Windows applications, both its own and those from developers.
Longhorn will provide a common feed list of subscriptions and a common feed store of data in Longhorn, which will be available to applications through Windows APIs, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager of Longhorn browsing and RSS technologies.
Microsoft also plans to let users automatically discover and then subscribe to feeds in Internet Explorer 7, a capability already in competing browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari browser.
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