Updating the CxO blogroll

Sean McGrath, Propylon

Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld

I've made a few updates to my CxO blogroll recently. I've added Sean McGrath, CTO of Propylon. I really appreciate his thoughtful perspectives on XML and information modeling. And InfoWorld's own CTO, Chad Dickerson, has a blog that's starting to cook as well. Today Chad dings Microsoft for failing to support MSXML 4 on Mac OS X.

I agree with Chad, but let's not let Apple off the hook either. The XML parsing and transformation features of MSXML are really OS capabilities, albeit ones that have been delivered piecemeal in browser upgrades. This stuff belongs in the core Windows OS, and presumably will migrate there. Should Apple depend on Microsoft for such a critical piece of its own strategic infrastructure? Clearly not.

I am of course able to outfit my TiBook with excellent open-source XML technologies -- Xerces, Xalan -- but these are even less integral to OS X than MSXML is to Windows. In my view, Apple ought to deliver in OS X a robust, standard, and fully-integrated XML infrastructure, and then challenge Microsoft to use it, rather than its own bundled stuff. That'd be an acid test of Office 11's openness with respect to XML standards! And in any case, the Mac needs that infrastructure for its own purposes.

PS: The CxO blogroll has a couple of honorary members at this point. Phil Windley resigned as Utah's CIO, but I'm holding his spot. He's an extraordinary thinker, writer, and doer whose revolutionary approach to public service will one day, I am sure, become the norm. And Jeremy Allaire just resigned as Macromedia's CTO -- news that, quite remarkably, broke first on his blog. I'm holding Jeremy's spot as well. He's always seemed most excited about projects that pushed Macromedia's envelope, like the Flash Communication Server, so I'm curious to see what he comes up with next.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/02/07.html#a598