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Dvorak Says MS Should Buy Opera
patro writes "Should MS beef up cranky old Internet Explorer for today's standards? Dvorak thinks buying Opera would be a smarter move. It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore and $400 million for it is pocket money for Microsoft."
...Dvorak is a hack...so, there you have it.
Last week everyone thought Opera was being bought by Google. So now its obvious that MS should buy it first to keep it out of the hands of Google.
Microsoft doesn't want their stuff to work on all other platforms... After all, they intentionally discontinued work on IE for mac, and have bought several companies only to immediately axe their Linux offerings.
Microsoft is not a company selling apps, Microsoft is a company selling lock-in. As long as customers are sticking with them, they don't really need to spend "pocket change" to keep up with technology.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
This guy proves he is once again off his rocker. IE 7, even in beta (with the latest builds of Vista), is a damn fine browser. Better than even Firefox/Mozilla dare I say it. Microsoft's browser team is doing just fine on its own.
Dvorak has apparently forgotten all the work that Microsoft put into stuffing Internet Explorer and its components into every unlikely corner of the Windows operating systems. You can't just easily rip that out and replace it with a new browser..
This makes me think I overestimated him.
MS chooses to stop supporting the Mac with IE. For whatever reason, they think that's in their best interest. Now Dvorak thinks that's MS should spend $400M to abandon the browser they've been pushing for 10 years, to buy one that supports an OS they just walked away from.
MS hasn't even stopped supoport for IE yet, just annouced it. If they changed their mind and think it's such a big mistake, they can continue IE on MacOS.
He's just another utterly clueless pundit. To have them buy Opera is to admit that they didn't have what it takes to secure and extend the thing. MS flatly won't be inclined to do that if they can help it- this suggestion is in the same class as saying MS ought to do a Linux version of MS Office.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Unlikely. Opera isn't compatible with Microsoft's business strategy since it implements web standards.
The thing is, it really wouldn't be the smarter thing to do. What the fuck does Microsoft really need from IE that they won't get by bolting on a prettier interface with tabs and fixing a couple of nagging developer issues? Opera doesn't exactly render pages 100% compatible with IE which is kind of important. In fact, I'd venture to guess that Mozilla-based browsers render far more of the web than Opera. If it ain't that broke (to them at least) why would they bother going to that length to "fix" it?
Why does Dvorak even make it on here? I'm not trying to troll, just noticing that every Dvorak post made is a HUGE flamewar against his ignorance in computing. I mean, sure, he can have his opinion. But why does it make slashdot EVERY single time he makes a comment?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
I understand that IE has had security vulnerabilities, but, well, so have all the others just as soon as they gained some popularity.
Saying "now that Firefox is popular, it will be just as vulnerable" is like saying "if everyone started driving armoured vans, then it would be just as easy to break into them as Pintos". It ignores the underlying fact that Firefox is simply built more securely to begin with, largely due to the fact that it is not so heavily tied into the operating system.
Of course there are bugs in Firefox. There will still be a hell of a lot less than in IE's horribly insecure spaghetti code.
Microsoft already covered this when they based IE on Mosaic years ago. Mosaic used to run on more platforms. They could just take the Opera code base and do the same thing they did with Mosaic, knee-cap and labotomize it.
Seriously though, I think it's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. I don't see why MS should want to sink so much money into something that they already have and don't really make money on anyway. It may be pocket change for MS at this point, but that doesn't mean they should throw their pocket change in the gutter. The future not incredibly rosey for this point, they need better planning than to buy someone elses product that does the same thing as something they already have. You may not like IE, but it's good enough for the majority of users. I'm not trying to evangelize MS BTW, I'm writing this message through Firefox.
You should try the newest Opera build, it blows FF away. The only possible way FF beats it is via extensions.
When I read the headline, I immediately thought, "yeah, right." Love or hate MS, IE 6 usability and look and feel pretty much kicks ass.
What?... What?!?
IE 6 is crap, through and through. It doesn't even have tabbed browsing. It is ugly. It violates plenty of basic UI principles. It does not have a build in, working ad blocker. The pop-up blocking is sub par. The security is abysmal and it can't even properly render Web pages written in WC3 standards set half a decade ago. It is ugly and unusable in my opinion.
IE will be the standard for a long time, and another reason to choose Windows over the 'competition'.
Nobody chooses Windows except OEMs that don't want to be run out of business. It comes pre-installed on every computer you buy (sans a few renegades that don't really affect the market). Some people choose the competition, but only after they have been forced to pay for MS's products first. I certainly hope it is not the standard for years to come, because that would imply that Web technologies will stagnate for another decade as MS refuses to implement any new standards and instead tries to covertly take over the Web using broken standards and proprietary extensions. I certainly don't look forward to another five years of coding pages to the standards, then working around all of IE's bugs and flaws.
I agree MS won't buy Opera to use the browser, but that is because they want a broken browser tied to the OS as tightly as possible, not because it is not superior. The banner ads you complain of are because they actually have to pay for developers with money not acquired via a monopoly. MS just rolls the cost into Windows, which you have to buy anyway, even if you plan to run Linux. Don't worry, if MS does acquire them there would be no banner ads and even if you run Linux you'll be paying for the developers. Gee, great, huh?
IE was woven into the codebase for Windows itself. I doubt Microsoft has the talent to untangle it, even with Vista.
Or maybe they wouldn't, and just leave the bloat there, with another userland application plonked down on top of it. Would be their style.
You want to talk about 1994 UI land?
Number one: why are you typing "C:\" into a web browser's address bar? It's not a valid internet URL.
Number Two: "C:\" itself is 1982 UI, so you're really stretching the complaint.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
All the posts here are saying this would be a terrible idea but no one has mentioned why.
Yeah it would suck because MS would inevitably discontinue opera on all platforms besides windows, rename it, integrate it into the OS and make it uninstallable, and, then, MS would really have the best browser offering, and we'd all have nothing left to complain about.
But, that is why it would be such a good move. Fixing IE is gonna take alot of developer time and money, probably about as much as they'd pay to purchase Opera. Yeah, to fit into MS's strategy they'd have to completely hobble Opera and basically destroy all the good things about it.. But, they'd get a secure, fast, bloat free, feature rich browser that was coherently developed.
I think you're all opposed to the idea because it would be about the worst thing that could happen to OSS/Mozilla/Firefox. It would be a complete slap in the face, and it would destroy Firefox's momentum overnight. I'm against the idea too, cause I like opera, and it would be sad to see it destroyed by MS, but I don't think its a bad idea for MS. I think it would be about the most intelligent/strategic thing they could do right now.
One post mentioned "why spend money on something that you don't make money on" well they've been spending money every year for developers to build IE it doesn't seem to be a problem, another poster said "why spend money on something you already have" MS doesn't have an Opera-calibur browser, and making IE an opera-calibur browser is going to take alot of time and money.
I think MS is really pretty scared about the competition from google, from the web finally starting to matter in a real way. As MS loses market share in browsers, they lose hits to msn.com. honestly how many of you firefox users have your homepage set to msn.com? But IE comes with msn.com as the default homepage on every computer I've ever used. That loss of hits costs them money. They have no choice but to try to maintain 90%+ browser market share, if they were to drop to 50% market share, they'd really be hurting. I don't think anyone uses msn.com through an active choice... People choose to use Yahoo, Google, whatever, the only people who use msn.com are those who haven't changed their default home page. In short MS's only competitive advantage on the web is that they have a huge userbase that uses their browser... If they lose that, they lose everything else on the web, everyone will be at Google or Yahoo.
His entire argument is predicated upon the false premises that Microsoft wants to support open standards and that they want to support the Mac.
Microsoft has virtually bottomless resources - if they really wanted to, they could crank out a secure cross-platform web browser that supported relevant standards. What Microsoft has is exactly what they want - vendor lock-in with a mediocre product that through its various 'feature-driven' incompatibilities gives them some sense of control.
If Mircosoft can't own the roads, they want to own the potholes.
Actually, I've never seen a cellular phone that runs WinCE. Most cell phones actually run Symbian. Blackberry's run a proprietary OS. Some of the other PDA phones run PalmOS.
Since most cell phones also come with a JRE, there is very little reason to make a phone wince with WinCE.
:May I be the first to say...
Dvorak is a dickhead.
No, I didn't RTFA. I've just read enough of the other stuff he's written.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
>It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore
They say that as if Microsoft might want to support other platforms. IE works on Mac but they're tossing that out, so why would they buy another browser for that reason?
Nah, the only reason MS would buy Opera would be to lock it in a dumpster somewhere, never to be seen again.
400 mil is an awful lot of money to fix a browser... For a 1/10 of that price, you could fix the current IE... Plus, MS has to save face here... Buying opera is as much as saying "IE is worthless, buggy, crap... we had to buy opera because it was just too bad to be fixed"... Not exactly positive PR...
You need to chill out. An "idiot's view of 'what software should be'"? You mean having standards? Oh. Right. We're talking about *Microsoft's* browser. Sorry. Here's an idea: Since everyone who's using a webbrowser is using a kernel too, why don't we just put the browser right in the kernel? Why not just make the entire OS one giant piece of code? Because seperation keeps things orderly. Keeping things orderly keeps things secure and stable. (Ever used a classic MacOS? Unstable as hell in real life use.) Having the file:// protocol is one thing, but having an entire file manager built into a browser is called bloat. "About your multiple roots idea: stop it already. i can just as easily type "my computer" (which i can rename to whatever the hell i want), or "my network places" or whatever the hell other arbitrary root i happen to want into there. just because you are ignorant of this does not make the facts any less true." I think you're confused here. The "My Computer", etc are not roots. A root is the top level directory in a filesystem. Usually, a system's boot disk is root and all other disks and devices exist as files on the root disk, and can be mounted to directories below root. In Linux: Root is "/". The root directory is home to everything on your system. You may store your documents in the directory "/home/Me/docs". That paper I wrote may be "/home/Me/docs/paper.txt". Binaries in "/bin" (among others). The physical harddrive is represented by the file "/dev/hda" and it's partitions by "/dev/hda1", "/dev/hda2", etc. To actually use it, it is mounted. It is logically attached to the filesystem. I may decide to mount "/dev/hda5" to the directory "/mnt/FatDisk" (or wherever I choose) and then I'd be able to access the files on that partition by moving to the directory. Devices (Monitor, mouse, etc) are also files in the "/dev" directory. In Windows, etc: Each disk is it's own root. The boot disk is c: and all files on it are represented in relation to the "c:" root. "c:\Program Files\game.exe" is an executable in the PF directory in the c: disk's root directory. All other disks have their own roots (d:, z:, etc). The problem here is that there can only be a limited number of roots assigned (a-z). Not really a problem in home use, though. "My Computer" is really just a special directory with some links in it. Yes I know I suck at explaining things.
What Microsoft should do is *outsource* to the Opera crew, i.e. no Microsoft developers would be allowed to touch the code, and Microsoft managers wouldn't be able to manage the project.
http://outcampaign.org/
I rather suspect Jon is filthy rich a few times over, regardless. I've met him and he is a very solid sort of guy, well-grounded. I expect he knows fully that his life won't get any better with an gross excess of wealth, and I rather doubt he measures his achievements in dollars. Money is great and all, but it's gotta be kept in perspective to all else that's important in life.
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