Microsoft 'under attack' On All Fronts

khujifig writes "The Beeb are carrying a story looking at the challenges facing Microsoft in the next few years. This includes a brief description of the M.Home (sans Clippy) which the Beeb describes as "a far cry from real life", and a discussion of the next few years competition for Microsoft. They go on to highlight Linux, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP and Firefox (which Gates himself has used: "I played around with it a bit, but it's just another browser, and IE [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better,"), and look Apple in relation to Longhorn. Not as bad a read as I was expecting. Their summary: Microsoft is under 'attack' on all fronts, and either needs to innovate or die. "Why use Microsoft if you have a broadband connection and combine Firefox with powerful web services like Google's Gmail?."" It should be said, tho', that articles like this have been written about MSFT for a long time - and there's still billions in their war-chest.

Comments

Re:How is IE better? Can you name 1 reason? Just 1

[kisrael]

An excerpt from the firefox forums I posted to : http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2510 92&highlight=

# IE has a very usable FTP 2-way client, Firefox has an FTP browser only.
# IE has a better password-remembering system.
# Firefox's Ctrl-F doesn't seem to search input form fields.
# IE's "mouse select jumps to word boundaries" is not perfect but better than Firefox's character based model.
# Ctrl-N in IE brings up a clone of the current window, complete with history. Firefox opens up my startpage...redundant, because I can easily launch it from the start menu.
# Ctrl-T in Firefox opens up a new and utterly blank tab...even more useless than the Ctrl-N behavior!
# IE shows undisplayable characters with box placeholders, Firefox uses question marks.
# Tabbing in Firefox doesn't doesn't reset the cursor blink cycle, or something, so you don't get instant confirmation that you're typing in the correct box.
# IE has better drag and drop editing of the toolbars, including the "File Edit View" bar. (I like compressing that bar, 5 small buttons, and the address bar all on one line.)
# Ctrl-O in firefox is the normal file open dialog...not as useful as IE's URL-or-file-browse feature.
# I wish Firefox had an option to let each tab have its own close button...often I want to quickly close a bunch of tabs based on their title, but instead I have to switch to each one and close it seperately.

Some of those are just matters of opinion, none are that that major, but IE does have some usability pluses.