Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog

I believe he is saying that Longhorn's capability to *centrally aggregate the RSS feeds* is what is going to put companies (Bloglines, NetGator, etc.) out of business. I think he is right. The inclusion of RSS in IE7 is largely irrelevant and neither good nor bad. As you accurately point out, FireFox and others have been doing that for quite some time.

I think it's crazy talk. NB: haven't actually used the RSS support in Longhorn yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

I've put together several RSS aggregators for my own use, and believe me when I say that solving the problems of plumbing (getting the feed contents), itemization (handling the subtle nuances between feed producers' feed formats) and storage (how to store the feeds, what to do with the items) are low-value problems - solving them is simply the baseline cost of producing a desktop aggregator, before you start adding any features to it. Sure, it's kinda fun to fiddle with RSS parsing, but from an actually-doing-something productivity perspective you just need a list of those [item]s!

Bloglines centrally aggregates feeds from a location not tied to a specific computer, and they're a web application, so they're not exactly in the fat client category.

Newsgator offer both desktop aggregators and a central syncrhonization service that allow the RSS store to transcend a single PC. The desktop aggregators can probably benefit from the RSS plumbing support in Longhorn (or continue to go their own way), and so can various other applications, but hopefully in an easy-to-program way with a nice, standard library and some easy to follow script examples, rather than having to learn XML and namespaces and blah, and blah, and blah.

RSS/Atom/XML are open formats, so supporting a format itself isn't the issue; the value proposition of what the aggregating application does is what ultimately sells it.