Microsoft Competition + RSS = Portals for the Masses

Three years ago, enterprise software vendors such as Peoplesoft (now Oracle) and Computer Associates made a big pitch to put "portals" on workers desktops. Portals are an aggregation of data from a variety of sources often displayed in newspaper form. In fact, the home pages of CNN, Yahoo and Excite all have the look-and-feel of portals, but require user customization to make it personalized.

In the past year or so, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has used the power of XML and HTML to allow almost anybody to subscribe to news and information feeds from the sources they choose. Smart aggregators such as Yahoo have made My Yahoo, a personal home page with RSS, a big deal. Note that this Blog can be delivered to you by clicking here.

Where is this going? I think we are going to see some very rapid convergence over the next couple of years and consumers will like it. First, Microsoft has made it very clear that there will be a lot of RSS-related functionality in Windows Vista, which we'll see at least a public beta of next year. That tips the rest of the software industry that they better catch up -- or better yet, get ahead, of slow-moving Microsoft. Apple, for instance, just got out RSS with the OS x 10.4 Tiger release this spring. But Tiger also includes Widgets that can get data off the net and do something with it.

I see a technology smorgasbord of My Yahoo-like front-page layout tools, Apple OS X-like widgets, RSS newsreaders, and Microsoft templates allowing web users to create their own powerful information aggregation portals that workers and consumers can use.

The technology will be free and largely open source. I disagree with the conclusion of the blogged opinion article that Microsoft will "take over" RSS. And I suspect that the enterprise portal software suppliers will be cutting prices in the not too distant future.

-- Peter S. Kastner