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by Ben Last.
Original Post: You Can't Get There From Here
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Joel Spolsky writes today on the subject of proposed changes to HTML4. This is interesting, but he doth contradict himself, though indirectly. Actually, I'm being unfair to Joel - most of his requests are for client-side changes, not radical shifts in the nature of HTML and HTTP. But there are implication in there that get me to thinking... Yesterday I read his post on How Microsoft Lost The API War, interesting and well-reasoned thoughts on Microsoft past and future, in which he said:
Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. ... So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they're happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they're far less likely to upgrade. This didn't matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine.
That's what allowed Microsoft products to become de-facto standards; you upgraded Windows and lo! you got all this new stuff, some of which you wanted but a lot of which came with it and became part of The Great Installed Base. Most notable amongst these; IE itself.
But IE, like Windows, is out there. It works; why change?. There are (according to the user-agent logs I see from time to time) still plenty of people using older version of IE. In the future, people will use it on phones, or other embedded devices that don't get updated once bought. The time when a new version of HTML could be introduced and spread like a better breed of grass over the plains of the world is past. Sure, it'll happen, but on nothing like the super-fast-blink-and-you-miss-it days of Internet Time, when whole new iterations of the Web standard could (it seemed) come and go in a month. Remember Push?
But the relative stability that we have now is, in many ways, a Good Thing. Paradigm shifts are like major tectonic events to those of us who have to develop close to the ground, in amongst the details; from far enough away in space and time, they're impressive; possibly even a necessary part of the processes that give us the digital equivalents of the Himalayas, great established mountain ranges of standards and proven ways to use them. Up close, a paradigm shifting can throw your whole project out of line. Anyone else still have a Microsoft J++ t-shirt?
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