Dave Winer on Paladium ...
by Volker Weber
in particular and Microsoft in general:
I got a briefing yesterday from some Microsoft people on Palladium. It was an interesting but depressing meeting. They're putting a lot of effort into something that no one I know wants. There are few if any developers to validate the idea. Any developer with a mind is going to stay out of Microsoft's program, remembering this is the company that cuts off the air supply of its successful developers. This is a tragedy, because MS is a PR-conscious company, that at its core probably wants developers, but in the heat of their war with Netscape and Sun, and then the DOJ, forgot their mission and lost their way. Now the software business is a wrecked landscape. They're producing products as if it were not. That won't work.
Net-net, if you want developers, you have to work really hard over a long time to get some trust so there can be some triangulation on your ideas. As it stands, there's no way to know if the claims MS makes are credible. Absent any way to know, I'm going to assume the worst. Unfortunately, based on the history of the last ten years, that's the only reasonable assumption one can make about Microsoft.
