In this MediaPost article, my friends Tom Hespos and Rick Bruner are quoted as saying XML syndication will need Microsoft’s involvement to go mainstream. With all due respect, they’ve got it exactly backward from a historical perspective. Microsoft launched CDF, a format that is arguably the ancestor to RSS, way back in 1997 with Internet Explorer 4.0. It was a dud precisely because of their ham-fisted, BigCo mindset at the time, involving a few big publishers in the process but completely neglecting amateurs and small organizations, the very actors who made RSS the success it is today.

Yes, Microsoft could accelerate the use of syndication at this point, but its direct involvement is in no way needed for a breakthrough to happen, and on the other hand it wouldn’t be a guarantee of widespread adoption either. Other internet protocols and formats such as e-mail, HTML, PDF or instant messaging all broke through regardless of Microsoft, and Microsoft failed in more than one occasion to make some of their online initiatives take hold in the marketplace (remember ActiveX?).