InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!
About time someone called RSS for what it truly is — ActiveDesktop redux. Just kidding. Back in the day, when Forbes.com was looking for Microsoft’s blessing, we built an active desktop CDF channel that pushed a "quote of the day" onto the user’s IE 4.0 enabled desktop. The thing was an utter kludge our CTO John Moschetto cooked up in a short amount of time.
What did it do for us? Not much, other than the right to say Forbes was baked into IE 4.0.
Me, I like to compare RSS to good old Pointcast.