ABC News: The Great Microsoft Blunder
ABC News: The Great Microsoft Blunder:
What?!? Can it be that I actually agree with MS building and maintaining Internet Explorer? Well, I wouldn't go so far, but I would say that the reasons for MS to build, ship and maintain one browser in their product are really sensible, if you've been In the Business. Watch me get all elitist now.
No, really: MS needs to ship a browser of some sort; it's got so much stuff being rendered by some HTML engine, that it's got to have something shipping with the OS already. It needs those libraries, as we call them, the code that comes with IE or Firefox(ugh) or Opera, so that we can actually use the machine for something right out of the box. Otherwise, you fools who's just paid $200 to $300 for Windows would be pretty pissed that you can't do anything on the Internet. Download a browser? How?!? You can't access the internet to download Seamonkey if you don't already have a browser.
MS should not build their own, then, you'll say. I say I don't disagree with you: the Company should focus on the OS itself, and leave the applications to an application developer. Choose one it likes, pay that company a bunch to develop it, and ship that one company's products as the de facto included browser when it ships the OS. Fine.
Oh, and the coolest thing is, MS has a whack of engineers. It could step in to help out this company - let's call the winning company Spyglass, just for fun - if their product really has a problem. I mean, the security of the browser product is rather important, so toss a bunch of engineers on this thing. Oh, heck, why keep it as an external company? Buy the whole thing and make sure that we don't spend too much on it.
But what if the product itself has way too many problems? What if the company not has to compete for love from Mr Bill, and that maybe some of its assigned resources get pulled over to Windows or Office when needed? Who works on the browser? What about security?
And that, my friends, is what I'll bet happened exactly. Spyglass licensed them their Mosaic product for a whack of cash and a percentage of the profits. MS then bundled it as IE into Windows 95, and made no direct profit and so didn't have to pay Spyglass a bunch of money. MS derived all its IE off the SpyGlass code, and still credits Spyglass in the About page.
Projects in MS vie for people and importance. It's a bit of a competition, according to popular rumour, and project funding - in terms of cash and people - can fluctuate. It's unfortunate that the IE project has suffered in the past, and that several key decisions turned out to be very unsafe. I don't blame MS for that.
I blame MS for perpetuating what I consider to be a series of very unsafe features, not admitting they really blew it, and releasing more secure products instead. This is truly a mistake, and that's why I slam both IE and MS, and not because they took a very intelligent step by licensing a product and then later bringing most of it in-house.
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.Friends of mine will no doubt be surprised (so get ready), but I don't agree with Mr Dvorak on this one.
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…
What?!? Can it be that I actually agree with MS building and maintaining Internet Explorer? Well, I wouldn't go so far, but I would say that the reasons for MS to build, ship and maintain one browser in their product are really sensible, if you've been In the Business. Watch me get all elitist now.
No, really: MS needs to ship a browser of some sort; it's got so much stuff being rendered by some HTML engine, that it's got to have something shipping with the OS already. It needs those libraries, as we call them, the code that comes with IE or Firefox(ugh) or Opera, so that we can actually use the machine for something right out of the box. Otherwise, you fools who's just paid $200 to $300 for Windows would be pretty pissed that you can't do anything on the Internet. Download a browser? How?!? You can't access the internet to download Seamonkey if you don't already have a browser.
MS should not build their own, then, you'll say. I say I don't disagree with you: the Company should focus on the OS itself, and leave the applications to an application developer. Choose one it likes, pay that company a bunch to develop it, and ship that one company's products as the de facto included browser when it ships the OS. Fine.
Oh, and the coolest thing is, MS has a whack of engineers. It could step in to help out this company - let's call the winning company Spyglass, just for fun - if their product really has a problem. I mean, the security of the browser product is rather important, so toss a bunch of engineers on this thing. Oh, heck, why keep it as an external company? Buy the whole thing and make sure that we don't spend too much on it.
But what if the product itself has way too many problems? What if the company not has to compete for love from Mr Bill, and that maybe some of its assigned resources get pulled over to Windows or Office when needed? Who works on the browser? What about security?
And that, my friends, is what I'll bet happened exactly. Spyglass licensed them their Mosaic product for a whack of cash and a percentage of the profits. MS then bundled it as IE into Windows 95, and made no direct profit and so didn't have to pay Spyglass a bunch of money. MS derived all its IE off the SpyGlass code, and still credits Spyglass in the About page.
Projects in MS vie for people and importance. It's a bit of a competition, according to popular rumour, and project funding - in terms of cash and people - can fluctuate. It's unfortunate that the IE project has suffered in the past, and that several key decisions turned out to be very unsafe. I don't blame MS for that.
I blame MS for perpetuating what I consider to be a series of very unsafe features, not admitting they really blew it, and releasing more secure products instead. This is truly a mistake, and that's why I slam both IE and MS, and not because they took a very intelligent step by licensing a product and then later bringing most of it in-house.
posted by Westley | 11:22 PM
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