It’s not always true that the neatest, most advanced technology ends up winning most of the market share. There are other reasons which get in the way. Sometimes, the less advanced solutions end up winning — and evolve in order to become more solid and established. An example of this is Javascript/AJAX, which has conquered most of the web-based client programming — despite the fact that there were competing technologies which could (and maybe should) have easily won, purely based on technical merits. How did that happen?

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer’s memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that’s allowed: he’s a “mad” corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention. Taking about Internet applications being popular, he wrote: “But we also need to make sure developers have the .NET skills to write unique Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation”. Which begs the question: does anybody still develop Microsoft Windows applications? Really?

A few years ago, when you wanted to use a GNU/Linux distribution for your desktop computer, you still needed to concede a part of your freedom to open some PDF files, run most Java programs, or all Flash animations.

Not anymore.