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Robert X. Cringely writes in his latest I, Cringely the Pulpit:
Against this rational if minicomputer-centric thinking, we have the alternative of spending $30,000 per store putting in Windows 2000 systems that talk .NET, spewing XML statements back and forth. In this retail context, XML replaces an earlier standard called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI failed because it was too big and slow, requiring too much bandwidth. XML requires four times the bandwidth of EDI. What do you think is going to happen?
You wouldn't know it from this quote, but the article is actually about ASP. No, not the prefix of ASP.NET. The other ASP.
What, you don't see why ASP is the opposition to XML and .NET? No matter. The Molech[*] must have his tax. There can't be an article on future trends in IT without some good-old MS bashing, now can there?
This is the next to last paragraph in an article of 13 paragraphs. I should really commend Mr. Cringely for almost succeeding to write an article in which Microsoft is not mentioned. If he only cut short the article by two paragraphs. At least he didn't mention the Evil Empire by name. Did that make you feel better, Mr. Cringely?
(And more to the point, even if XML is four times the size of EDI, we sure have more bandwidth than we did ten years ago, we now have good compression standards that can be invoked automatically, and for the price of a single mini-computer, you can put up a nice web farm with a robust database backend. Moreover, EDI didn't fail because it was big and slow. It failed because collaboration is hard, and because there's far more to passing semantics between loosely-coupled systems than just agreeing on the syntax. The semantic web is only beginning.)
[*] King, ruler (Yiddish)
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