It's also an illustration of one of the big problems that I think Microsoft is facing. The everything integrated into the operating system story sounds good, and from a particular view of system architecture makes sense. You move things that everybody uses down into a system layer so it can be leveraged. The problem comes when all the pieces become very dependent on each other. Now you can't ship IE without shipping parts X, Y, and Z from Longhorn. But those parts depend on A, B, and C which in turn depend on yet other parts. Pretty soon you reach the point where you can't ship IE without shipping Longhorn. Granted, I'm taking this to an extreme to make a point, but it seems to me that the integrated delivery strategy that Microsoft (and Sun in the J2SE, J2EE) has committed to is going to force them to go slower and slower, and to become less and less responsive to changes in the marketplace (you can see this very clearly in Java). When everything is tightly integrated, you need more communications between components (both human and code), you need more testing, you need more of everthing. And the stakes are higher because it's all or nothing. Seems to be an odd strategy for a company that's touting the benefits of loosely coupled web services.

Timoty Appnel is talking about a SOAP/RSS based weblog API. I was meaning to talk to Dare about this at the Crossroads get together, but we got diverted, and Sam wasn't there -- he's been talking about this idea for a while. I think that use of a SOAP document / literal wrapper for RSS items is a viable way to do a weblog API. The biggest rationale I can see for this right now is that XML-RPC based API's don't have proper XML support for character encoding, which makes life difficult for people who don't use Euro character sets. Are there hacks around it? Probably, but it seems to me that an API for personal publishing should have first class support for any character set that people want to use. We've already had problems with non ISO-8859 character support in pyblosxom. There are fixes in the 0.7 series -- but it doesn't help to have support in pyblosxom, if people can't use bloggerAPI or metaweblogAPI to post their entries.