The Great Microsoft Blunder wrote:Internet Explorer is a dead albatross.
John Dvorak - PC Magazine
April 24
I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision—and perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe—the company ever made. I call it the Great Microsoft Blunder.
It looks like a whopper that keeps whacking the company. The most recent bash came from the Eolas v. Microsoft patent suit over aspects of the ActiveX usage in Internet Explorer. Microsoft lost and was slapped with a $521 million settlement.
If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised.
All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.
The joke of it is that Microsoft is still working on this dead albatross and is apparently ready to roll out a new version, since most of the smart money has been fleeing to Firefox or Opera. This means new rounds of patches and lost money. Continue reading…
This fiasco and the great Microsoft Blunder began when Marc Andreessen, then of Netscape, made some silly, off-handed remark about how the browser would become the next platform for applications and suggested, in so many words, that Microsoft would be destroyed. Instead of the boys at Microsoft laughing out loud and then ignoring this remark, they started scrambling around like ants on a hot stove.
The next thing you know, Microsoft went Internet slaphappy. Besides cobbling together a browser from any code it could license, it rolled out all sorts of Internet magazines and various Internet-centric ideas to the point where it was obvious to anyone watching that the company itself was believing all the hype coming from outside.
The main piece of propaganda among the Internet-centric ideas was that the personal computer is dead. "There'll be no computers in a few short years, as everything will be embedded and become appliances," said all the experts.
This appliance malarkey comes and goes, but always goes. We still have computers, we still need operating systems, and we still need Microsoft Office. Yes, there are alternatives to everything, but the gold standards for all these basics make most of the money, no matter what anyone idealizes to the contrary.
But Microsoft buys the fear. It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up!
So what can Microsoft do about its dilemma? First, it needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.
Of this I can assure you. People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be.
Of course we already know that this will never happen, since Microsoft is a creature of habit. So it will forever be plagued by its greatest blunder ever. Have fun, boys.
I'm guessing the tl;dr version is "lolz, M$ sux and so does IE"?
Mayabird is my girlfriend
Justice League:BotM:MM:SDnet City Watch:Cybertron's Finest "Well then, science is bullshit. "
-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
The sad thing is, I doubt they could ever get Internet Explorer out of Windows now that it's jammed in there so tight. I've found that some non-internet applications won't even run if you disable internet explorer too far, some of the internet explorer stuff seems to needed to run them. Same for fricking media player.
Well, at this point it does more good then harm. A lot of apps need to have accses to a html rendering engine for their own purposes and being certain one exists and works in a certain way (which you get with explorer being installed with every Windows) simplifies development a lot. Same thing with the media player. You could kill the actual UI apps (btw, iexplore is a 91kb .exe file - its nothing more then a wrapper for the underlying tech), but the underlying tech is valuable and much welcome with developers.
Of course, the original decision to integrate it so heavily into the system was a bad one. And all effort should be made to harden those systems against attack. But yanking them out at this point is simply impossible.
Besides, having a browser already present simplifies getting Firefox a lot
"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
"One Drive, One Partition, the One True Path" ~ ars technica forums - warrens - on hhd partitioning schemes.
DPDarkPrimus wrote:I'm guessing the tl;dr version is "lolz, M$ sux and so does IE"?
Actually his claim seems to be that Microsoft didn't need to develop IE and did it due to insecurity.
If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.
This fiasco and the great Microsoft Blunder began when Marc Andreessen, then of Netscape, made some silly, off-handed remark about how the browser would become the next platform for applications and suggested, in so many words, that Microsoft would be destroyed. Instead of the boys at Microsoft laughing out loud and then ignoring this remark, they started scrambling around like ants on a hot stove.
But Microsoft buys the fear.
It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business.
Photography Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Microsoft exists in a field where institutionalized paranoia is a good thing, because it is posible for a company to go from nothing to a mover and shaker overnight. This is quite literially how Microsoft gained the majority of thier market share.
Google when from a little know search company to the single largest player in just a year or so, which in business terms is horrifyingly fast.
"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
"One Drive, One Partition, the One True Path" ~ ars technica forums - warrens - on hhd partitioning schemes.
