Ceasar Microsoftus

"Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic—never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun—and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it."

This article (courtesy of Dan) is ostensibly about the new browser wars, lead by Mozilla Firefox against the Evil Empire. The following paragraph is chilling:

"The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global infrastructure—a global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For Microsoft, the best possible outcome is for the standards-based web to be reduced to the profitless: a few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, and the disaffected. Few others will want to go there; so every day there will be fewer traditional websites, every day less relevance."