[Infowarrior] - The Great Microsoft Blunder

[Richard Forno]

Wow....here's a Dvorak column that I can agree with nearly 100%.  Is there a
full moon tonight?    -rick


The Great Microsoft Blunder
 Internet Explorer is a dead albatross.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=1884077
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 readingŠ

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.