Yes, XP or maybe a couple years earlier was about when the dominant theme switched from innovation to version churn, getting customers to keep re-buying the same things over and over whether they needed updating or not.
I remember in '99 there was an ActiveX object called XmlHttpRequest, that made what we called “back channel requests” - it made a call to an url and handed the results to script in the page, which could do whatever we wanted with it - populate fields, make things appear or disappear, etc. At that time this only worked in IE. It genuinely turned web pages into apps - very exciting! I randomly had a conversation with the IE dev manager and asked him if this feature would be native in the next version of IE instead of having to use an ActiveX object. Surprisingly he wasn’t even familiar with the whole concept, and said, almost verbatim: “Now that Netscape is basically dead, there’s really no motivation for us to innovate in the browser space.” A couple years later somebody wrote an article calling the whole process “AJAX” and explained clearly how to do it, and suddenly it was the new web dev hotness. Firefox added native support for it, and MS (as usual) was playing catch-up.
Yes, XP or maybe a couple years earlier was about when the dominant theme switched from innovation to version churn, getting customers to keep re-buying the same things over and over whether they needed updating or not.
I remember in '99 there was an ActiveX object called XmlHttpRequest, that made what we called “back channel requests” - it made a call to an url and handed the results to script in the page, which could do whatever we wanted with it - populate fields, make things appear or disappear, etc. At that time this only worked in IE. It genuinely turned web pages into apps - very exciting! I randomly had a conversation with the IE dev manager and asked him if this feature would be native in the next version of IE instead of having to use an ActiveX object. Surprisingly he wasn’t even familiar with the whole concept, and said, almost verbatim: “Now that Netscape is basically dead, there’s really no motivation for us to innovate in the browser space.” A couple years later somebody wrote an article calling the whole process “AJAX” and explained clearly how to do it, and suddenly it was the new web dev hotness. Firefox added native support for it, and MS (as usual) was playing catch-up.