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Second Foundation

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 8259 days AGO

A Microsoft group led by Edward Jung. Contributed to [create Sidewalk].

"Generally speaking, our mission was to enable applications to expose their semantics. Among many other things, doing so enables the development of generic "user interface drivers". Currently, if we wish to support N user interface modes (GUI desktop, HTML thin client, pen tablet, small-screen PDA, voice-only telephony, ...) and M applications (Outlook, Sidewalk, Word, ...), developers must write N*M user interfaces. Given a semantic platform, we could implement a N user interface drivers and M application semantic models; the platform would make everything work. We liked to describe this as the logical extension of the video and printer drivers already present in the Windows platform.

"Not incidentally, such a platform would give Microsoft a key advantage in the emerging world of ubiquitous computing devices, allowing Microsoft to capture vast new markets and maintain the exponential revenue and share price growth to which it had become addicted.

""Ordinary" Microsoft developers thought we were lunatics. They weren't all wrong, but they weren't all right, either. We did do some interesting things on the way to our inevitable demise."