RSS implementation by Microsoft

This is an excellent article in PC Magazine (how can that co-exist with Dvorak's now infamous article?). Microsoft is planning to implement RSS support into their future version of Internet Explorer and Windows (Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn). The point of the article is that this could very well kill the many RSS clients and applications used at the moment, just like Internet Explorer annihilated Netscape.

At a time when Microsoft has been accused of anti-competitive practices, it seems that the balance is going to be difficult to be kept. The inclusion of RSS into Windows will probably mean that RSS will become mainstream and that the blogging revolution will continue. Aggregation will be the next step in web design, with Explorer and Outlook playing the key role to make it available everywhere. But I still feel uneasy about the fact that this will spell doom for the early RSS developers, those who made sure that aggregation works here and now. Microsoft just bets on the winner technology and takes it over.