brentashley

Dave Winer pointed today to this article on CNet about Marc Andreesen and Nicholas Negroponte’s involvement in Bang Networks. It seems that they managed to score 18 million in VC funding by convincing the investors that there’s something new or revolutionary in making background connections from a web client to the server and updating the page content without a refresh.

I really had to look at this hard to convince myself it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. Apparently it’s not. They seem to really believe that they’re breaking new ground. Sure, they’re making the connection persistent for push and building some huge marketable network of services onto it, but still, fresh technology it ain’t.

Of course, those who have been using Internet Explorer and any of the various available forms of remote scripting have been doing this for YEARS.

The difference is, I guess, that those Netscape centric folks who have had their Microsoft-filtering shades on are finally with a workable NS6 DOM sparking up a clue that there can be life after a page is rendered.

If Netscape 4.x hadn’t been holding us back all this time, we’d all have been enjoying the benefits of a rich application environment inside a browser for years now.

Welcome to 1998, Marc. Your coffee’s cold.