April 30, 2007 01:38
The other day I was reading through the chaos of Digg, and clicked through to a collection of the Tango icons, which are used in interfaces for a lot of popular open source software projects.
Having a consistent user interface is something that is ideally a good thing. Apple has been doing it awhile now, where you see almost all third-party developers create software that looks like it came directly from Apple.
I, myself, have noted how using Adobe products is great, because the hotkeys in Photoshop and Illustrator are similar to the ones in InDesign, and it is very easy to figure out new things, based on your knowledge of other Adobe products.
This got me also thinking about the Mozilla rendering engine, also known as Gecko, which is what drives Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other upcoming projects, like the Songbird media player.
The idea is that Gecko is based on XUL (pronounced like Zuul), which is XML for user interfaces. This is a great concept, because it means you use CSS and Javascript to create the interface, just like you do for websites.
So now, as opposed to open source projects revolving only around C and C++ programmers, you have an army of converted web designers and developers that can do your bidding. Of course you’ll still need (and have) your generic CS people to do part of it, but the floodgates are opened to allow many others to help as well.
What’s my point?
Well, right now, we’ve begun to see the end of Microsoft. The way that Google has become a giant overnight has got people talking about how they’ll bring down the ol’ MS. They are introducing a crazy amount of web apps that compete directly with MS Office, and have created a solid foundation over internet advertising, as well as a strange control over the content on the internet itself.
It’s true that they will break down Microsoft, bringing them to their knees. But it won’t kill them. As long as Google sticks primarily to web applications, it can never destroy a company founded on desktop applications. Who will? Why, Mozilla, of course.
With the Mozilla rendering engine and XUL, they are, right now laying the groundwork to unify and solidify the major open source applications. All it takes is for people to begin converting things like Open Office, the GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, and a host of others, over to Gecko, and it will have begun.
It won’t just affect Microsoft, of course. Adobe will feel it as well. Right now, they’ve been worried about MS as their future competitor, though in truth they have no real contenders. They probably would never even consider that a Gecko-fied descendent of the GIMP could dethrone them, but it is quite possible.
This may be ten years off, and it would require the unification of all of the applications that compete with Adobe, but once formed, they could potentially be superior to the entire Creative Suite. And free, to boot.
So, assuming that Google doesn’t consume the Mozilla Foundation, there is a strong possibility that it will one day rise up to control most of the software in the world. Granted, it will be Google who will do the most damage to Microsoft, but it’ll be the Gecko that finally comes in and gets the frag.