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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."
Microsoft doesn't want a very nice UI for the web unless they control it. If the standards supported a nice neat replacement for your typical win32 gui then Microsoft is pretty much out of business as they currently stand. It's inevitable that the web GUI encroaches on win32 GUI applitions hence why MS is getting more and more into online services. The writing is on the wall and they'll resist the writing as long as possible - which means a crippled IE with lagging features for all of us.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Opera has (had?) some great developers. They don't get the credit they deserve for innovation
Now THERE you're really hitting the point, but not even completely. It's not just their innovating new features, but the performance they're able to achieve with their application. The speed and memory requirements are fantastic compared to everything else out there. IE and FF can't touch Opera for memory usage OR speed (in most cases).
I just wish it's renderer was better; it produces goofy results too often. I'd like to see them take the Gecko renderer and run it through the Opera-resource-debigulator(tm) and use that in Opera. I'd also like them to make an email client that doesn't require 30Meg of RAM, and actually performs at a reasonable speed. Ugh. Let's hope Thunderbird 1.5 is a big improvement in the performance arena, though I have no hope it'll be anything other than worse in the resource requirements arena.
First time I've heard of that..
.Net, WebTV, C#, Citrix, SoftPC, Hotmail, the list goes on.. It's the Story of Microsoft - all the way back to DOS.
Usually it seems that Microsoft buys out a company that is most enticing to it's competitors, then turning that heralded technology into a White Elephant on their own.
If they can't buy it, they re-implement it - badly.
IE, Xbox, J++,
What they can't come up with on their own, they imitate or buy.
more.
Google could do good with Opera. The only reason Microsoft would buy it is to suffocate it in a dark closet.
As usual, Dvorak's knowledge of the topic at hand is shallow and his conclusions are simplistic and short sighted.
Microsoft is not interesting in gaining browser market share outside of the Windows platform. Sure, they might be able to steer more people toward MSN and thereby make more in advertising revenue, but how much more? If 90% of the market already uses Windows, and gaining that extra 10% is fairly difficult for a wide variety of reasons, it may not be worth it to them.
Even if it was, it has nothing to do with why Microsoft dropped support for the Mac. The direction Microsoft is taking IE is different than the direction everybody else is taking web browsers. Microsoft sees IE as an application that will allow users to access both web pages and smart client applications.
They see the future as a mesh of standard web apps and smart client applications created with things like ClickOnce (at first), and eventually IE-hosted Avalon applications. (WPF.) Their hope is that eventually the line between web apps and client apps will blur, and since it will be (they hope) via IE and Avalon, it will draw even more people to using Windows since the UI/functionality experience is so much better than standard web applications. At least that's the business point of view.