On Fri, 28 May 2004, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
One gets the feeling that the merged proposal was arrived at
just so as to not piss off Microsoft.
Well, yes. That's the issue. You know the Golden Rule? "He who has the
gold, makes the rules."
The majority of email clients on the Internet are running Microsoft
software. Without Microsoft on board any attempt to reform how email is
handled won't get very far.
What we need to watch out for are attempts to "embrance and extend" the
protocol so that Microsoft mail servers can interoperate but other servers
can't. This is exactly what Microsoft did to Kerberos, for example. If
we leave Microsoft an opening to do that, they *will*.