Sure, change is inevitable – and, in most cases, a good thing.

How to make the distinction on what the change Microsoft’s Longhorn will make is a bit perplexing. (Read some of Tim Bray’s observations, or read a Microsoft Avalon article).

Things are changing more than just an OS change. This isn’t just a new OS, it’s a change on par with the DOS CLI to GUI that the original Macintosh introduced (to the masses – don’t flame me on the whole PARC history; I know…).

I don’t quite understand it all – I’ve read too little about it all to venture solid opinions – but it appears to bring the scripting capabilities of HTML to higher-level languages. However, the scripts (in the case of Avalon, XAML – an XML-based language, I guess) are merely wrappers for distinct classes in the API. So, much like a H3 tag in HTML represents – if you will – an API call to the browser’s rendering engine (really a parsing operation, but bear with me), the XAML is an API call to the actual OS.

Youch! That’s powerful.

And allows the representation of objects/text to be the same in applications or the browser (hey, calling the same API).

I’m going to have to look more closely at all this, and see just what the heck it means for those not on Longhorn. Then what happens?

This is bigger than I ever thought.

< A few minutes later >

I just finished the Avalon article, which included this conclusion:

Hey, I was on the money about the Net/desktop (apps) convergence concept. Scary….