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Comment by Toshio | Hacker News Reader

I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions".

In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is light years ahead.

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Oh brother. Offended?

While it's true that Microsoft has done it's part to hold up progress, the fact is that much of what you love about the web today can be directly traced back to innovation at Redmond. Let's give them credit where credit is due. Hell, they came up with AJAX so people could access Outlook from the web. Do you remember how obnoxious browsing was before XMLHttpRequest?

To be fair, that was kind of an accident. Xmlhttprequest just kind of sat there until somebody else came up with a use for it.

It's an accident of history that's it's primarily used for Json and not Xml, but you can hardly argue that the API itself was an accident.

Frankly, the importance of json in this matter is pretty minor anyhow: if it hadn't been around, you can bet some nice JS library would have come up with a different way to easily decode server data into JS objects. The scripted communication was key.

Why discount Microsoft's contribution just because "if they didn't do it, someone else would have"? If that's how you think, then nobody's contribution to the world is significant, since "somebody else would have done it."

Not really. Not all contributions are equal. For every contribution A there is a likelihood L(A, X) that is the chance of someone else making the same contribution within time X.

It seems completely reasonable to rank contributions with low values for L (for a given X) higher than others. People are claiming that Microsofts contributions have very high values for L, ie. if MS hadn't come up with it, someone else would have in short order. Furthermore, people are claiming the same is not true for other contributions, e.g. TBL "inventing" the web, or what have you.

I am agreed with you but still codeka point is valid. Granted for a given X there would be low values of L that make the contribution irrelevant. What I differ from you is saying that X is static. Einstein might helped to get the atomic bomb working faster, but there are good chances that eventually it would come out anyway.

Anyway, discarding contributions in that way seems disingenuous in the best case. What would happen if Newton wouldn't invent Calculus? Well somebody else would invent it later but we should be thankful that that didn't take 100 years more.

How soon we forget. If TBL hadn't invented the web, we all would have had to wait six months for gopher to come out. Hell, SGML + FTP is practically the same as the web, and that was around for years.

Heh. I knew that whatever example I came up with, someone would come along and bash it.

Just goes to show, there's not much point in identifying "inevitable" innovations. History quickly forgets the also-rans.

In a parallel universe, someone else posted this comment as well.

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