

Javascript is now strategic for Microsoft - mwsherman
http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Javascript-is-now-strategic-for-Microsoft.aspx

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taitems
An important example is when Microsoft launches the web suite for Office 2010
and it potentially runs slowly in older IE versions.

What will also be interesting is how far their backwards compatability
travels. Will Microsoft signal the death of IE6 by not supporting their own
software in their web Office suite? Unlikely, but interesting regardless.

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joechung
SharePoint 2010 will not support Internet Explorer 6.

Reference:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announci...](http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-
sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx)

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andreyf
_In this video, Chris Bryant of Microsoft makes an offhand comment that the
components of the new Microsoft Office 2010 for Web are "some of the biggest
Javascript applications ever built"_

Yuk, big does not necessarily imply good. From the video, it looks like
they've ported as much of the Office applications as possible directly into
the browser. The only UI changes are the pieces they had to disregard because
the browser didn't support them.

Whatever "web 2.0" is, it isn't the same old applications now running in the
browser instead of MFC.

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JBiserkov
When comparing Office 2007 (and 2010) with Office 97 one can clearly see these
are not "the same old apps". Especially when combined with the Office Servers.

JavaScript isn't such a bad language. It's essentially Scheme in C cloths. It
has first-class functions, lexical closures, prototype-inheritance and more.

Just avoid the bad parts. See this Google Talk by Douglas Crockford
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook>

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mdg
yes. I always feel like javascript is never learned "the right way". I feel
this way because when I first learned it, I was essentially trying to write
java code.

I wonder why no one ever tells javascript noobies that functions limit scope,
not {} ?

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amadiver
Crazy... anyone have any theories on this? Especially why MS chose JS over
Silverlight?

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freetard
The reason to develop Silverlight was to kill flash and compete with Adobe.
However, Silverlight hasn't been a big success and it's now obvious that if
any technology is going to take over Flash, it's HTML5, CSS3 and JS. It seems
the best move to take JS seriously for MS. By the way, Microsoft is hosting
the jquery conference to come.

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StrawberryFrog
Silverlight is competing with flash as planned - read between the lines here -
Adobe is concerned with "Doing it right", possibly due to competition.
[http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/archives/2009/07/flex_4_beta_upd...](http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/archives/2009/07/flex_4_beta_update_1.html)

Silverlight hasn't taken over yet, and it's too soon to say it's "not a big
success" - it looks like it isn't a big failure - from what I heard from Scott
Guthrie's public talks, the installed base of SL is on track with MS
expectations. SL3 is being pushed quite hard, MS has not given up on it.

It's not obvious that HTML 5 will make Flash/Silverlight obsolete. But it's
competition for sure.

It is the nature of MS, being a very large company, when asked to chose
between competing technologies, to choose _both_ , so that whichever one wins
out, they will be there. Hence, Javascript and Silverlight.

MS has deep pockets, and in both paths is leverage existing assets to cut
costs and increase developer familarity - JQuery in Javascript, and .Net and
XAML in making silverlight.

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dtf
What are the chances of them inserting V8 into IE? Is that completely
unthinkable? They've been doing some crazy things lately...

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snprbob86
It is much more likely that they will use the CLR as a backend.

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troels
I'll see it before I believe it. I'd be very surprised if they didn't somehow
manage to cripple it on non-windows os'es. Sorry for being such a pessimistic
old man.

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thorax
Yeah, as I mentioned before, this was the interesting thing about the new
Office:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702707>

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christofd
WOW - Excel running in a Firefox browser (see video on page)

