I tend to avoid descending into conspiracy theories, since — in the
spirit of occams razor — incompetence and ignorance are often a more
straightforward explanation of the available evidence than collusion.
In this case, however, I find it difficult to rationalise Google's and
Mozilla's behaviour. They are being thoroughly lambasted on
hacks.mozilla.org, and have precious little to offer in their own
defence. Their core arguments (no usable SQL standard; Microsoft won't
do it; SQL is too heavyweight and less elegant than a JavaScript
solution) are utterly indefensible. It is difficult to reconcile this
with the expectation that the people defining the future of the web
must surely be smarter than the average bear.
Having said that, I'm no stranger to seeing astonishingly incompetent
architecture produces by extremely smart people. I have a hard copy of
code from a previous job that uses several hundred lines of code to
compare two dates and raise an error if one is less than the other. I
believe that a high degree of intelligence can in fact compromise
one's inability to see complexity for what it is. As Einstein put it,
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move
in the opposite direction."
So I am on the fence on this one, but I think Kevin's hypothesis is
perfectly plausible, and quite consistent with both the prima facie
evidence and the shenanigans that typically go on between heavyweight
corporate interests with large patent portfolios. And let's not forget
that Google is young and fragile when it comes to patent muscle. This
makes them an easy bullying target for the antagonists in this story,
Microsoft and Oracle.
On Apr 2, 5:50 pm, Kevin Layman <
kevin.lay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After mulling this over some and discussing with various others I've come to
> the conclusion that there has been some sort of secret deal worked between
> Google and Microsoft, and likely including Google's kept child Mozilla.
>
> Clearly Google as decided for some reason to abandon enabling the browser to
> compete with desktop-like apps. Their first move in this direction was the
> depreciation of Gears. They provided a smokescreen for this by saying they
> attained their goal of getting a commitment from Microsoft to support HTML5
> which would provide the same capabilities as Gears, and that they would
> support Gears until HTML5 was ready. And at that time it may not have been a
> smokescreen, it actually does make sense to push for standards instead of a
> plugin.
>
> But then what happens? Somehow the main standard committee kills the very
> popular Web Database standard that was replacing Gears storage capabilities
> in HTML5, even though if I understand it correctly a Google employee is the
> Chair of the committee?
>
> At the same time Mozilla announces they are dumping Web Database and going
> with IndexedDb, which by any objective analysis is a HUGE step backward for
> developers of database-centric Browser-based apps. See
> this<
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-and-the-r...>discussion