Monday, April 10, 2006 12:22 PM
As a long-time user of the
Newsgator feed reader, the weblog from Greg Reinacker, the founder of Newsgator, has been in my subscription list for some time. He often offers interesting insight, and a recent post is worth noting. Mainly, because I think he acknowledges the reality of Microsoft's "1000-pound gorilla" status and underscores the approximate adoption timelines for news readers and subscribing to content we can expect to see in the legal vertical.
Here is a relevent portion of his post:
I believe we're in the middle (er, beginning) of a paradigm shift on the internet. And that shift isn't about RSS; it's not about Atom. It's about subscribing to content. Users will come to expect that when they visit a web page, there is a consistent way to subscribe to the content on that page. If they can't subscribe to some particular site's content, they'll consider it a bug. They will likely visit their favorite search engines less often - and they will "cruise" less - because the content they care about is being delivered to them.
Microsoft is going to ship IE7 soon, and Windows Vista (including IE7) sometime after that. Now here's the thing. I don't think IE7 is the best experience for reading this content the user has subscribed to. But - and this is a big but - it's going to be the first exposure to RSS and subscriptions that millions of people see.
Tidbit - Microsoft said at one point they plan to ship 475 million units of Vista in the first 24 months. That's a lot. If I add up the total number of people in the world that have ever heard of RSS, I bet it's a lot less than 475 million.
Anyway, back to my point. People aren't going to look for subscribe buttons on a site any more; they're going to look for "subscribe" buttons in the browser or client they're using. That browser might be Firefox, it might be Safari, it might be IE7. But out of those three, IE is probably going to have the most market share.
While I don't 100% agree with everything Greg says, I think his assessment is generally very accurate. Indeed, we are not many months away from the big Microsoft Vista "splash." The ripples, good and bad, from that splash will be felt across the blawgosphere.
Bill Gratsch, Blawg.org .net .com -- You can syndicate Blawg headlines by clicking either of these icons:
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