Miguel de Icaza writes an interesting entry in his blog about Microsoft’s upcoming Avalon and XAML technologies and what Open Source needs to do to remain competitive against these technologies. Unfortunately, after reading the article I got more hyped up about Microsoft’s stuff than the work Miguel talks about.

Miguel mentions how Microsoft is not doing anything new with these technologies as they have already been done in the Open Source world. Well some of this stuff I certainly did not know so if it has been done, they have not done a good job of promoting it. OS needs better PR people. No good creating awesome technologies that no one will use.

Will Avalon only run on Longhorn? Maybe. But do not count on that. Microsoft built IE4 for Windows 98, and later backported it to Windows 95, Windows 3.11 and moved it to HP-UX and Solaris.

I hope he doesn’t think Microsoft is going to port that technology over to Linux. It was safe for them to port IE4 to HP-UX and Solaris because those were no threat to their desktop marketshare. Linux is. Sometimes poor Miguel gives Microsoft more credit than they are worth. With Longhorn they are looking to stomp all competition. Be prepared.