Danny Ayers responds to a comment by James Snell on the MS RSS announcement - here's James:

Despite Atom’s technical strengths relative to RSS [2.0], RSS has such momentum in the marketplace today that if the Atom folks came out and tried to bash their advantages around, claiming that RSS is legacy, that RSS sucks, that RSS is somehow closed and proprietary because it wasn’t developed using a community process, they’re going to come out on the loosing side of things. The people who support the Atom approach need to *demonstrate* the advantages of using Atom by deploying it side-by-side with RSS. Demonstrate the technical merit through example rather than evangelization and rhetoric. Show me the code, show me the benefit. Until you do, get used to hearing more and more people talk about RSS.

To which Danny states:

Ok, I’ll stick my neck out on a prediction or two. Some developers are bound to try producing/consuming RSS 2.0 including the various extensions: comments, Creative Commons, Yahoo Media, Microsost Lists. It won’t be easy to use such things in concert without a common language beyond XML syntax. If recent history is anything to go on, these folks will have their eyes glued to RSS 2.0 and blinkers on when it comes to the considerable work done around RDF/RSS 1.0 and Atom (which does have something of an extension mechanism). Expect ball of mud parsers and object models. An extension replacing the ill-specified escaping of content is likely to appear too. Before long, probably within a year, someone will propose an RSS Meta Format specification. By the year 2010 the “simple” RSS fork will have reached the point RSS 1.0 was at in 2000 (but everyone will be using Atom anyway, and no-one will notice).

I'll make a small comment here to Danny - Java and C# just suck compared to Smalltalk. And I mean suck. Technical merit doesn't always win the day, and James makes that point very well in this context.