Developers of the MSDN Library site, I feel your pain. You’ve perfected technology years ago (and I am not talking dog or Internet years!), quietly enjoying its success, only to have all of its coolness taken away by Google. Then, some hotshot comes along, slaps a four-letter moniker on it and bam! — you are so out of the picture, it’s not even funny.
For those who haven’t been paying attention (Watchful Mary Jo and even the Noble Scoble included, methinks), Microsoft had used AJAX in production sites for many, many years. How many? Well, let’s just say that there wasn’t an XmlHttpRequest spec properly implemented in Mozilla. And certainly before the term AJAX was coined. Observe Exhibit A, the tree menu of the MSDN library site: asynchronously loaded using JavaScript and XML, beta in 2001, live in early 2002.
What can you do, Microsoft dudes? You just don’t know how to coin cool four-letter acronyms. Although I have a feeling you could think of a few four-letter words right now…