I’ve been following closely all the announcements from Microsoft about the integration of RSS into the next versions of Internet Explorer (7.0) and Windows (Longhorn). All started at Gnomedex with some excited anticipation from Dave Winer

I think what they’re doing is cool.

and finally the official press release.

The RSS functionality in “Longhorn” is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, Microsoft announced Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists such as of photo albums, music playlists and top 10 lists as RSS feeds. Microsoft is making the specification freely available via the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released.

Mmm, I was puzzled, maybe a bit paranoid. I could not see what wrong, but defintely something was wrong. After the announcement the blogosphere showed some concerns about the RSS extensions proposed by Redmond, but basically everybody was happy.

Even Greg Reinacker from NewsGator was happy! He said to Red Herring:

“A bunch of people have asked if we see this as a huge threat to our business, and on the surface it may seem that way, but anything Microsoft does to further the adoption and awareness of RSS is a good thing for us.”

But yesterday I stumbled across this brilliant analysis by Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine and eventually I saw clearly what was wrong.

I hope Lance is wrong, I hope NewsGator, Bloglines and all the others will have a chance to survive … But Dave, my hero since a long time, has a different view

Eventually the large companies will catch up to small companies that aren’t moving.

But the small companies moved first and after being inspired by your vision Dave!