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IE The Great Microsoft Blunder?
JordanL writes "Hot on the heels of the beta rollouts of IE 7, comes an editorial from John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made. From the article: '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 [...] 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.'"
Dvorak doesn't mention what is probably the greatest profit center related to IE: MSN.com. It's highly unlikely that MSN.com would be the #3 search engine if it weren't for MSN being the default search engine for IE. It's rumored that Google averages 12 cents of revenue per query on google.com... if MSN makes even half of what Google does per query, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars per year in revenue. This recurring revenue stream is more than enough to justify an investment in a browser.
Other possible revenue streams for Microsoft IE include toolbar buttons and bookmarks, as well as the licensing of Internet Explorer to AOL and other companies to use as their default browser. Whether IE is profitable or not is still a mystery, but I definitely wouldn't say it has been a zero for Microsoft.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Wow, that's a first. I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day. =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
When has Microsoft ever delevered a product "as promised"?
As usual, Dvorak is on crack.
I'm not sure what he means by biggest, but microsoft's stupidist blunder was Bob and its most expensive blunder was the Cairo project (Cairo was later renamed and one of its most important element, OFS, is still nowhere in sight).
Internet exporer was not so much of a blunder as an expensive way to kill off Netscape (they were a much bigger threat then Dvorak makes out.
(the OT part) Still, at least Microsoft Bob was not a completely wasted effort - after all, you still have Rover the retriever to help you with searching in XP - and we all know that was worth waiting 10 years for...
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
this is the first time I have ever agreed with anything Dvorak has written.
...what's it made of, gold? but more seriously, this could well be a worth while investment for MS, if you make people used to your software then they keep coming back... see it as a loss leader. Some people will say "I want to stay using windows because it has IE and thats what I like" (I know you'll think no one would say that but they really do). So maybe not such a bad investment.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I just installed it a few minutes ago, and am using it now. Bleh. The interface is still pretty horrible. Is this supposed to be the final layout? UnBELIEVABLY bad! What are their UI people smoking? Or did they hire some Opera UI people?
:(
And the ClearType on by default is ridiculous.
At least I didn't do any stupid IE hacks with the sites I've developed for work - so everything works fine, except now with ClearType on by default, all the text looks bold, so many of our text links simply look like regular text. Nice UI move there, MS. *grumpy*
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS STORY. Dvorak is not that stupid. He's just tweaking the tech community to see if he can get a response. To date, the tech community has been as predictable as Marty McFly.
If you really want to understand Dvorak, pick apart the post I made on his last big story. I think you'll understand him a lot better if you can take a clinical look at his sudden and inexplicable leaps of logic. It's what he does, and he's damn good at it.
I know its hard to resist the Dvorak trolling, but you need to consider one thing: He's not listening to you. He doesn't even care about your opinion. His crazy theories are keeping the money flowing, and that's good enough. Arguing with his drivel is simply wasting your time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made. From the article: '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 [...] 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.'"
Yes, but we don't know what would have happened had they left netscape to dominate the market. Netscape might have taken over the world by now and enslaved us all!
Thank god for IE.
Is it just me of is posting any article about Dvork and calling him an expert trolling?
Or I should say flamebait? Good god.
http://saveie6.com/
Dvorak might have a point here, but for one thing: as long as people see IE as the default web browser, the idea that Windows is the only choice in operating systems is reinforced. Take the browser out of Microsoft's hands, and a lot of questions about how much we really need this Windows thing are raised. Those questions exist anyway, but the dominance of IE makes people less likely to ask them.
Many businesses, Microsoft included, have lost their focus of "how can we make / save the most money" and have been willing to throw away billions (or not pick up billions) in an effort to dominate several sectors of the market. It's a bad business strategy. Make 5 billion now instead of 10 billion in 20 years.
Who will the /. faithful back? The uber-troll Dvorak, or the uber-monopolist, Microsoft?
Windows ME. Clearly, IMO, the clear winner.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Dvorak? Making a grandiose statement dissing Microsoft? Say it ain't so!
(Yawns and waits for a real story.)
The Microsoft attitude to "do it all" and never retreat is how I view their attitude in attempting to be all for all PC users.
That leads to a tunnel vision in a bizarre way that doesn't allow rational business analysis to proceed and get carried out in practice.
It also leads them to litigation (read Bill's father's advice), when settlement would often be the wisest choice
Now that Dvorak has made his decision, we all know that IE is probably Microsoft's greatest triumph.
They probably didn't spend *enough* money on it.
Don't click the link! It only ensures more mindless sepculation from someone who likes to post his "computer industry fantasies" online...
I suspect the coding effort in IE is about 3% of that invested in XP and Vista. Where does he get the $billions cost from? A web browser is a biggish program, but many lone hackers have written one in under one person/year.
Blunder - how? It was a brilliant business move! It is THE example of monolpoly power - even if MS doesn't have the exact dictionary def. of "monopoly".
Yeah, yeah, courts of law of have ruled that MS is a monopoly - these same courts that have found that the internet is for stealing music and other copyright infringements....yeah, yeah...in a court of law I can prove that the sky is red... AC, Esq.
Opera? Please, God, no. As a web developer of umpteen years I would rather continue to develop both ActiveX and Java versions of half the stuff I do than look at Opera as a "primary" development target.
what is the penetration rate of IE ? 95 % ? do you call this 0 profit ???? so much for the greater view I guess
I find it harder and harder to pay attention to what Dvorak has to say. It seems like he has some outlandish thing to report on every week and none of them are really based in more than his own view of things.
Dvorak is more like The Inquirer or something now - comedy and/or sketchy news.
IE is a huge success:
The Web was threatening to become a client independent client platform.
Netscape looked like it would make a ton of money.
Microsoft had no significant web presence as a portal.
Now?
MSN is a huge portal.
Netscape is dead
And the web is a significant client-independant-client, as long as that client is Internet Explorer, which only runs on Windows...
IE preseved Microsoft's monopoly, killed a huge potential competitor, and has made microsoft a signiciant player in the Portal business.
Hardly a failure.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Likewise, the members of the "John Dorvak is a raving lunatic club" add another notch to total. Beneath his layers of lunacy lies a gain of truth IE needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from ground up. If Microsoft really put some effort into it, instead of having their bullshit stuffed execs. rave about more BS, they really could make a good browser (well, a decent one at least).
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
Yes, for most people ... of their entire OS ... all they really care about is their Internet Browser ... so they can surf the net, check emails, etc. ... And since IE comes as the default web browser, and most people aren't smart enough to know their are alternatives ... I personally think IE has been a big winner for MSFT ... not a blunder.
Dvorak couldn't be more incorrect. The dominance of Internet Explorer has guaranteed that every user must have at least one Windows machine in order to access some critical services, such as online banking and even confidential health communication systems. Without Internet Explorer and its proprietary extensions, Microsoft would be more threatened by other platforms, as there would no longer be such a critical justification for using their operating system.
Internet Explorer, despite having a poor reputation within the IT community, has been tremendously beneficial to Microsoft throughout its lifespan. Perhaps it is offered freely because Microsoft considers it to be one of their greatest strategic assets.
Do you like German cars?
Why is it that if I write something inflammatory, idiotic, and senselessly stupid and provocative that is designed only to infuriate the reader... I am a "troll" and I'm writing "flamebait." But if my name is John C. Dvorak, I am a "visionary" writing a "magazine column"?
This just in ... Dvorak just took a massive dump. Reporters from various news outlets are gathering to cover the news, with at least two subsequent /. stories on the event expected.
... it's like the XBox, a "loss leader" to help consolidate their monopoly.
Seriously, of course MS never expected to make money on a product they give away for free
Heh. You couldn't find any more biased article than that?
...Dvorak is an idiot. He does not rate a headline at Slashdot. I mean, Jeez, what's his definition of "blunder"? Something that creates huge lockin for Windows? Every time I cry about lack of standards support in web browsers, somebody says, "IE is the standard". And I hate to admit it, but they're right. There are zillions of Intranet applications that you need IE to use, and that means that there are zillions of companies that can't consider running anything but Windows on the desktop. Not the biggest reason nobody will look at alternatives to Windows, but it's up there.
BIG TENNIS. With very large BALLS and RACQUETS. LAND OF TENNIS.
IE isn't the biggest blunder. Actually, it was fairly shrewd (from a MS point of view) since they were originally selling it, then released it for free to compete with (and eventually pretty much sink) Netscape. IE removed a competitor from their market - so a strict profit and loss analysis doesn't really sum it up, IMHO. It's their standard strategy. Look at MS Virtual PC versus VMware for current data if you're interested.
So no, IE is not the biggest mistake MS has ever made. Making it part of the OS is. Especially when you couple it with DirectX, which originally let pretty much anyone out there run any code they like on your box. IE has a series of fantastically poor design decisions behind it. This far outshadows the lost productivity.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The problem when talking about this is that the definition of IE is slippery. Sometimes the HTML rendering engine is considered separately, or the math is done in such a way that the value of a separate HTML rendering engine for OS use is subtracted from the plus column. A browser has to handle malformed or oddly formed HTML, an OS-only HTML renderer doesn't.
...but if Microsoft were to discontinue all IE development and start bundling Firefox with their released operating system(s), how long before Firefox becomes an orgy of spyware, security problems, etc.?
...was defrag or windows sockets. Should of left the 3rd parties to fix this. They kept their eyes off the prize, which should have been MS BOB, not making an OS feature complete.
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.
.03% of total MS man hours lost on IE development would have pushed Vista out the door. Wow, too bad Billy G didn't think of that!
So spending the extra
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just rewrite Internet Explorer in .NET. They can leave the existing rendering engine behind as a legacy component and work on a new IE that can take advantage of .NET's security mechanisms. Not only would it be a good excuse for a clean break, but it would also give them a chance to show off what .NET can do for desktop apps.
As people keep forgetting, IE is a reusable component and because it's so easy to integrate to allow other applications easy browing, HTML editing support, and related technologies it's helped not only Microsoft's applications (using either MSHTML or the WebBrowser control) but countless numbers of developers.
While it probably has been expensive to maintain, I'm sure it adds a lot of value to all the applications that use either mshtml.dll (rendering) or shdocvw.dll (WebBrowser control, which uses MSHTML but adds more navigation functionality).
I think credit should be given to IE and Microsoft for inspiring the next generation of browsers. I mean, if it weren't for Internet Explorer setting the bar in browser features and functionality, we wouldn't have such a great open source push for a great new browser platform such as Firefox or Opera.
:-(
Imagine if Microsoft's only competition was Netscape
Almost every media outlet has someone whose job it is to write inflammatory rhetoric (at the local level, usually jeers directed at the local local sports teams) in order to sell papers. For example, it's what journalist-cum-troller Andrew Orlwoski does at the register. Dvorak is doing more of the same here.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
IE was also a tool to control AOL (who had very close ties to Netscape - but was a big enough company for Microsoft to care about that market, yet continued to use IE); and the foundation for their ISP business.
I would venture a guess that IE 7 is the main reason Windows Vista has been delayed. Once IE 7 has gone through beta I expect to see a sumultaneous release of IE 7 and Vista.
Dvorak has been the classical asshole industry columnist for a long time — and he is that stupid. This isn't even the stupidest thing he's said. I first realized how stupid he was back in 1983, when he made some silly pronouncements about the secret plans of a company I was working for. It was painfully obvious that he hadn't the slightest understanding of the technology we sold. Why he continues to get published is one of the great mysteries of our time.
What shade of blue is your sky?
A lot of times saying Dvorak is wrong is like saying that someone is wrong for saying the sky is blue becuase they haven't specified what shade, or that it doesn't account for clouds. Dvorak talks about speculatively about things without a speculative tone, and this makes what he is saying "wrong" to a lot of people.
Considering the funky keyboard they named after him, is this any surprise?
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It would seem if I understand what dumbass is declaring this time, that IE is nothing but a blood-sucking product for M$. I'm generally a M$ critic, but this statement seems pretty weird. There are things that IE has historically done better than other browsers. The main problem that M$ has with IE is that 6 was lame and it has taken foever to get to 7. In the meantime there haven't been any real innovations in the beta to differentiate it from Opera, FF or Safari. However, saying that it's doing nothing but costing M$ money is pretty stupid. If nothing else it gives M$ a reliable platform upon which to build ASP and Atlas apps, thus making the entire web-development suite for M$ capable of producing results that are predictable since they control the display engine. What the heck is wrong with that? What happens if one of the others accidentally or intentionally breaks something or another internally? What is M$ to do - say "oh crap, none of our .net .asp etc. apps don't work any longer, fix the problem!"? No. Then they're in the same boat that everyone else is in when dealing with M$, except they are no longer the party in control. As usual, dude needs to stop doing the chronic and get a real job.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
I don't work at google, but I know how to run their business better than they do. They must really feel dumb for wasting their time on something that generates such little profit. Next time, they should just listen to me.
This guy needs to stop smoking rock.. His predicitions and opinions are just really nutty lately. Dvorak thinks hes on cnn playing the role of Larry King.. Anyways, My question - Why is MS holding on to IE so tightly? Is it because of its intergration with windows? Why not just opensource the damn thing and let the public fix it? IE is not a bad browser, its had bad security.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
"Puts on flame retardinate uniform"
Um, just curious. Is this what one uses when the short bus catches on fire?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I keep starting on a reasoned critique of his arguments, but it just feels so pointless, so empty.
I'm just gonna have to go with:
"That's nice, John."
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
as usual he completely misses the point..
IE gives MS control(POWER), they can direct and guide web technologies, they can set the default to their websites, they can control which inovations make it and which dont. they can give preference to their own. Control is very important.
Also it helps them eliminate alot of competition, for one it nearly destroyed netscape. and lets them sink competing standards. so it saves them money by eliminating and manipulating competition
It helps keep them ontop of their hill and everyone else lower
Well, the post tags say it all:
[+] troll, dvorak, ie, stupid, idiot (tagging beta)
(ps. WHY does it have to say 'tagging beta' after EVERY set of tags?)
Of course, the general rule of thumb with Dvorak is that the opposite of whatever he says is true.
I don't like IE, I don't use IE, but it still gets shipped with 95%+ of all windows boxes on this planet and most users don't switch. Which is exactly why IE7, for bad or for worse, will instantly have a huge userbase once OEMs switch.
a $521 million settlement is pocket change for MS.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
A 'blunder' that still holds 85% market share? Yeah, right. Not to mention IIS, Frontpage, and all the other business it drove MS's way.
Sure, welding IE to the OS caused them antitrust trouble and neverending security problems. But, IE has to go on the books as a net gain for M$. Consider what the last 11 years would have looked like for them without it.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
ClearType, nor any other antialiasing scheme for that matter, doesn't alter fonts sufficiently enough for them to look bold. Whatever is causing the bold appearance, ClearType isn't it. If turning off ClearType fixes the problem, then the switch must be doing more than simply turning ClearType on or off. Besides, I thought ClearType was an OS-wide, on/off thing.
I typed in the "Star Trek" game that worked great on the PDP-11- ?(30 I'm not sure after 30 years?)
From what I can remember, when you typed coord's, it didn't prompt you, it just sent you there ... or, when you hit return, it would keep playing the game - ignoring the prompt command (I don't even remember the prompt command in BASIC - not MS' BASIC, but THE REAL BASIC) - what I'm trying to say is the TRS-80 BASIC interpreter DIDN'T work like the PDP-11.
Billions in loss?
Pre-IE, Microsoft was terrified of the potential (and declared goal) of Netscape turning their web browser into a virtual computer desktop, complete with the ability to generate applications and so on.
Of what need is Microsoft if suddenly all apps are written in this virtual computer browser, and one no longer needs any kind of OS beyond that needed to support the browser, which is to say, just a little HAL layer depending on IBM PC architecture, Mac, etc.
And their goal worked. While technically possible via Java and its clumsy built-in windowing abilities, nobody is out there promoting this heavily since there is no cohesive development environment and system being pushed -- unless you count Visual Java development environment from Microsoft, heavily integrated into IE.
So yes, there was a lot at stake. "Billions and billions" as a loss leader for Microsoft with Bill Gates at the helm, is a calculated risk. See also the money-losing X-Box series. This is why Bill Gates is worth more than many countries' GDP and Dvorak is a fat, bitchy commentator.
John Dvorak Thatcher: Charles! I happen to know this little e-enterprise of yours cost you a billion dollars last year.
Charles Foster Gates: Yes, Mr. Thatcher. This virtual paper lost a billion dollars last year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars this year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars next year. You know what, Mr. Thatcher? At a rate of a billion dollars a year, I'll have to close this place...in sixty years!
Cue horns: Wah wah wah wha waaaaaaaaaaaaah...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...to be used in all further Dvorak "news": "Dvorak dvo dvo dvorak, dvo dvorak rak rak, dvorak. Dvo, rak, dvo-dvo rak. Dvo ? Rak, rak."
From the parent:
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 [...] 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.'"
In all honestly, its a headline I would love to read. I absolutely can not stand the crap software or the tactics put out by that company. However, I will not dignifiy Dvorak with the ad revenue of clicking to his article and will instead take apart his weak qoute from the Slashdot story...
Dvorak, quite simily, is an idiot or is on something. I'll go with the former. First off, on any given development project, there is a finite number of developers that you can through at it before productivity begins to go down. As such, it makes sense for a company like Microsoft with BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars laying around to create other teams to do other things. The utter failure of Vista has nothing at all to do with IE and all its associated problems.
Ok, so now that we've dealt with how the two could not possibly be linked lets look at the reason d'etre for IE. IE has probably not DIRECTLY generated any revenue for Microsoft, however indirectly its been a cash cow. Had MS not used illegal predatory practices and bundled IE with Windows and given it away for free, MS would have steadily lost a foothold in the OS market by giving Netscape the browser edge. Even more servers would be UNIX based Apache (or Netscape) web servers and MS and its operating system would have been completely commoditized faster than its already happening. Every major web page that "works best with IE #.##" means another desktop that is not running Linux or OS X or whatever other great alternative we would have found. Its absolutely assinine to question why MS "keeps their browser afloat".
Well, there goes 15 minutes of my life, rebuffing Dvorak, when I could have been doing something more productive like watching dust settle on my finger nails. Stupid me.
Well, think about it this way: do you think we would have FireFox now, if not for IE?
dom
One more of these crap articles and hopefully we can pretend none of them ever happened!
Why, yes, he's all of those things!!
Amazing this new fangled technology -- how does it know?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Mind you, even though IE has been riddled with security issues from the very beginning, IE set up a unique precedent in providing a cheap window to the web. Effectively, Microsoft was able to show the world that one's limitations for computing might require only the browser itself. Don't forget that IE's contribution (free browser for expensive PCs) may have pushed the idea forward that the browser could eventually replace an entire PC, such as a thin client.
While everyone is writing about the improvements in the new IE beta released last night, Dvorak found a way to get some more traffic by writing the opposite to appeal the Slashdot geeks and MS haters.
People should simply start ignoring this jerk, his "analysis" makes no sense whatsoever and is apparently designed to stir the community.
Isn't IE a critical component of Windows Vista? :-)
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work
There's just one guy at Microsoft. He works on IE on tuesday's and thursdays and works on Vista on Mondays and Fridays. (hump day is spent playing Halo 2)
Because we all know that the only problem with Vista was that there wasn't enough people working on it...
[+] troll, stupid, dvorak, ie, idiot (tagging beta)
This just in from credible sources:
Dvorak Dvorak sat on a wall,
Dvorak Dvorak had a great fall,
All the sane men in IT,
Could not put Dvorak together again
I have already spent two hours today with Microsoft's phone service. My latest conversation...keep in mind that I fumbled through this because the employee was Indian and I couldn't understand his English. Outsourcing for computer assistance is not smart when it gets really technical and they cannot follow their click-through help screens.
MS employee: "What can I help you with today?"
Me: "I have a problem with IE 7.0. On IE 6.0.2, it worked fine this morning to log into our state
government application and access payroll timesheet information but we cannot do it with 7.0. I think
it may be some sort of javascript error because it will not even run the script when I click on the
button."
MS employee: "OK, who is your ISP provider?"
Me: "Huh?"
MS employee: "Who do you get your internet from?"
Me: "It's a LAN. I work for the state government. I'm not sure who they buy their bandwidth from but
we manage our own servers."
MS employee: "No, no. Who do you call for your dial-up or cable modem?
Me: "I don't. It's on a network."
MS employee: "I do not understand. Who do you use to get your internet access?"
Me: "Are you kidding me? I am on a LAN. That is a Local Access Network and means that we don't have to
call anybody or connect. It is automatic. We have a number of servers that work together to run login
scripts and provide both network and internet access."
MS employee: "Hmmm. How many people connect on this network?"
Me: "You need to know how many?"
MS employee: "Yes."
Me: "I don't know. 400? 600? Probably 600 within this building."
MS employee: "Oh my god."
After a few minutes of arguing with him that since the application problem is within IE 7.0 and not on our server, he refused to help me. I was told that he was only trained in workgroups and not domains. My response was that it was IE 7.0 that was causing the trouble. There were no problems with IE 6.0.2 this morning when I tried it. I hadn't changed domains or anything like that. It should work.
MS employee: "Thank you but we will fix the problem before the full version. That is why it is a beta release."
Me: "What do you mean you will fix the problem?"
MS Employee: "It will work in the final release."
Me: "But I haven't even told you the exact problem. You keep asking me about domains and workgroups and I told you it was something else."
MS Employee: "Yes, I know and Microsoft will fix it."
Me: "I don't believe you. You don't even know what the problem is. If you did, you would have hopefully fixed it before you released the beta. And if I don't help you out with this and tell you the problem so your programmers know what to fix, it won't work in the final version either."
MS Employee: "I understand this. Thank you."
Me: "Wait. Do you have somebody that can talk to me---like your boss?"
MS Employee: "Yes, please hold."
And I wait for another 10 minutes. The boss gets on and is actually competent in trouble-shooting. He takes me through some steps with the Computer Management and in the Internet Security Settings. Then, I open IE 7.0 again to see if the problem is still there. It is.
MS boss: "What do you see?"
Me: "The same thing as before. I try to click on the submit input button to pull up the form but nothing happens. The mouse-over just changes the text color but the javascript isn't executed like it was in IE 6.0"
MS Employee: "Do you get an error? Can you read me the error message?"
Me: I read him the message.
MS Employee: "Can you spell everything out for me?"
Me: I spell it all out and then he requests the URL in the error message so I begin to spell out the website address.
MS Employee: "Wait, what was that?"
Me: "Dot C-O-M."
MS Employee: "Can you repeat that?"
Me: "Period. C-O-M"
MS Employee: "Please, spell that last part out."
Me: "It IS spelled out. It's the ending on the last part of the website. It's the generic extension like Microsoft DO
It's remarkable - the range of things we can do to scrape up a living. As puzzling and comical as Home Shopping Network's profitability.
I'm afraid that its not quite so simple. You see, Internet Explorer is actually a tiny program, some 40K and did not cost billions to develop.
However, the MSHTML (Rednering engine, like Gecko), WININET (network client protocol stack), and other associated components did. But they are not there in vain. They do make Windows a richer platform to program in.
Not that I'm a huge Microsoft supporter here, but being able to pop up rich text (via HTML, not RTF) without requiring the user install additional software is a great boon to software publishers.
I work on an embedded device that can interface with a Windows PC for a user interface. The Windows application provides rich error messages (important for this product) because of MSHTML. It uses WININET to fetch updates from the Internet.
These components make Windows a better platform to develop on. And the work that went into them was not just to further the browser program (IEXPLORE.EXE).
And the Linux community has their own form of this (libcurl).
And then Microsoft removes functionality it had already delivered. They locked down the themes of Windows 98 and removed the folder customization entirely. There's already word of functionality that exists in Vista betas (keywords) that Microsoft is eliminating, apparently to some all or none mentality.
And just like the fast-food compliment, IE also leaves a bad taste in your mouth...
Opera is the most customisable interface I've ever encountered, and not just browsers. The 'out-of-the-box' GUI on a new install includes every option as a method of displaying to new users that those options are available. Yep, it's cluttered, but takes about 30 seconds to make Opera look the way you want it, and when tidied up it's easily the cleanest and most user friendly interface out there.
I use Firefox also, and while it's an awesome browser it could stand to learn a little (or a lot) about UI customisation from Opera, IMO. Opera long-ago invented 90% of the much-touted "new" features in other browsers, including Firefox. Bashing it seems a little hypocritical.
That's what they called the office complex in which msn.com was hosted (back in 2001 when I worked there.) The only profit making "property" in MSN was, obviously, ads. However, that alone isn't enough to cover all the other loss making properties, hence msn.com as a whole was also loss making. Not sure how it is now.
Printer companies are stupid because they virtually give their printers away. Always at a loss to the company.
Let's not look at the big picture with the purchase of ink.
Jonesy
he must have given you some of that crack he's on
This guy is ALWAYS right. I can't wait to compile open source OSX on my Dell.
> Considering the funky keyboard they named
> after him, is this any surprise?
I remember JD writing a while ago (1995?) that he was surprised as anyone to find out the keyboard Dvorak actually was a relative of his.
sPh
...when Dvoracks rambling actually seem to make sense.
Step 1: Give Internet Explorer away for free and include it with every copy of Windows sold, increasing its usage to over 80%. Step 2: Break from accepted standards. Website programmers become lazy and code to these broken standards. Now Internet Explorer is the only browser that will properly render all websites. Usage surges to over 90%. Step 3: Require users have the latest version of Windows to use the latest version of Internet Explorer. Now, even though the browser is still free, in a roundabout way people have to pay to use it. Step 4: Profit. Oh yea, Dvorak is a yellow journalist. If Slashdot has a shred of integrity they should not post any of his articles.
That's not cool at ALL. I turn cleartype on or off, and it should stay that way. I don't want to do it 20 times in 20 places if this catches on.
While IE may have been important to Microsoft in the past as many people have pointed out, there is also another option for them now. They could take a small fraction of what they spend on IE and invest that in Firefox in exchange for having some input. They also could have few programmers at Microsoft donating code for Firefox. Then, they could just bundle Firefox with Windows and have it use MSN as the default search still. Sure Microsoft would argue things like Active X, but maybe there is a way to turn on and off your compatibility for those kinds of websites.
I think he meant "it's hard to resist [the siren song of] John Dvorak trolling people like us," not "it's hard to resist trolling John Dvorak's columns."
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Are you sure they really killed Netscape though? I still see Netscape and use Netscape. Only now its Mozilla.
Mozilla is dead, long live Netscape.
This is the first sensible statement, and the first intelligent article that I have read from John Dvorak in the last twenty years.
is what Dvorak is...MS is a _software_ company...of course they'll write the software, why the heck would they use _other_ software??
But everything they get with this loss leader could be obtained just as easily by bundling someone else's browser and forcing the defaults. Other companies built search engines and ISP businesses without developing their own browser. I can be done. In fact, others are currently doing it better than MS.
Dvorak is right: the expense of IE development could have been spent elsewhere, and MS would be none the worse off if they bundled somebody else's browser. Actually, Spyglass WAS somebody else's browser -- MS just got carried away with modifications. On the other hand, there is some Monday morning quarterbacking going on here. MS tried to "embrace and extend" the Internet. That approach works great when you have only incomplete standards and some room to maneuver. But nobody needed MS to "extend" HTTP.
If MS knew how the world would evolve, they would never have bothered with IE. But nobody knew for sure at the time. The early browsers were resource-intensive by the standards of the day; they were designed for X-windows workstations. I can understand why MS would want to get something light enough to run on typical PC hardware. The early versions of Mosaic for Windows required Win32S and more memory than most people had. Netscape was better, but there was still plenty of room for improvement. Besides, just about every product MS ever created had to displace an entrenched competitor in order to survive. They must have thought IE would do the same -- even if they had to give it away.
I run Windows XP Pro. Occasionally I get stuck running IE when I have to visit a retarded website that requires it. The default settings of MSN and the toolbar links lasted about 90 seconds after the first boot. I never signed up for any service because of anything IE did. MS additional profit by give me IE: $0.00. Yet their reputation for security and stability lives in infamy, thanks largely to IE and ActiveX plugins that let spyware and viruses play right through.
Oh please.
I don't know of one single person in this community who has ever believed Dvorak to be a reliable or knowledgeable source of information. He has been permanently branded by /. as someone who does not know in the least bit what he is talking about. Every single /. article related to Dvorak has never once had the majority of comments devoid of the thought "Dvorak is an idiot."
But, going back to the parent of this thread, the reason why Dvorak is writing this crap continually is because not only does he get paid, but PC Magazine is getting traffic and exposure as well. When his article is linked to on /., PC Magazine gets the desired traffic, leading to more revenue. That's why his editors still keep him around - they can count on a strong reaction from the tech community, from people like us who realize the Dvorak is spattering out dribble down his double chins and onto his Cheeto laden belly.
As for me, this will be the last time I ever look at a Dvorak article on /. I've had it with him.
Prove it.
If by richer you mean more obfuscated, sure.
Why not just embed your own HTML renderer?
You must be kidding. You're lucky if the error message even relates to what you are trying to accomplish at the time when developing for Windows.
WTF are you talking about?!?!?! You must have never used java to develop for ANY platform. Besides which you attribute all this to iexplorer.exe when explorer.exe is the real heart of the system. IE is a scaled back subset of Explorer, the piss poor navigation tool of the OS.
The world owes a helluva lot to MS and IE. Maybe it's a piece of crap browser now that every script kiddie and his little brother can hack it, but I don't think the internet would have progressed as far as it has to date without MS dumping it's "billions" into IE. Sometimes smart people get it wrong, like maybe John Dvorak has this time. I'm sure MS never intended to actually make money directly from IE, but if you take into account the indirect income from folks who bought a computer to access the internet using IE, anticompetitive or not, it made MS those billions back hand over fist. MS and IE bashing is in vogue right now, and one of the reasons, even though no one will admit it, is because they're on top of the hill and everyone's trying to push them off. Well, thanks Bill Gates for being such a genius prick and paving the way for all us idiots to comment on how evil you are.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
" John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made. "
In other news, the world declares not using a condom the biggest mistake Mr. and Mrs. Dvorak ever made...
Billions? Say it again? BILLIONS!
Wow, that's fun.
Dvorak's still a tool.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
IE exists for developers. The whole Windows platform is why people use Windows... not necessary bits and pieces. I can whip up an app with VB 6.0 with an integrated browser and/or browser functionality in under 30 seconds, and that alone will keep me buying copies of Windows. IE is used in tons of Windows apps, both commercial and custom. Without the drop-in IE COM objects, Windows as a development platform would be woefully incomplete and less compelling.
Adding the entire IE team to work on Vista would be the stupidest move anyone could ever make. It would only ensure that Vista was never released.
[+] troll, stupid, dvorak, ie, idiot
-"I ate what?"
A browser is a Java Execution Environment capable of executing local and remotely stored programs. That's what Microsoft wants to ensure they retain control over. Otherwise you could write in Java and run it on any device that can support FireFox and cut out Microsoft entirely.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Stupid Idiot? That would mean that there exists a Smart Idiot?
How many fewer WinXP licenses would Microsoft sell if they didn't have a 85% market share with IE? I personally know hundreds of developers who would not be using windows if they didn't have to test IE compatability. If I extrapolate my extremely unscientific studies I could assume that about half of the developers in the world would not be using Windows if they didn't have to keep IE compatability. Not to mention the number of people who can't switch because their bank site is IE only...
Blunder, windows is.
Throwing more people at a problem gets it done quicker and better...
Others have pointed out that IE is a loss-leader and worked very well indeed in preventing Netscape and the Internet from making Windows irrelevant.
Why does slashdot persist in giving Dvorak air time (other than the obvious, that he's no fan of MS)? I wonder what worthwhile stories were rejected so this could be posted?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You can think in this strategy for a number of companies. I'm sure that Microsoft has taken this into consideration. I'm sure they have their reasons and no one can project their future business decisions.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
That is of course assuming Netscape would have been able to ship a stable, working usable product. By the time NS4 was pushed, nay dragged, out of the door Netscape as an organization had lost the ability to ship software because they had lost their focus. They couldn't figure out whether they were a portal company or a browser producer or a groupware concern. And they didn't have the leadership to manage all three roles at once (unlike, say Google).
The antitrust trial was an absolute life saver for Andreseen & Co. Instead of the world realizing that they had gone into the Suck Zone for good, they got to whine about how Microsoft had stolen their lunch money.
Of course Microsoft was out to steal their lunch money. It's just that they didn't really need much help. If NS would have been an actually valuable browser platform then a lot of people would have continued to buy and download it, regardless of whether or not IE was bundled with the OS. People downloaded and used Winamp and lots of other media players for a long time even though Windows shipped with a media player of its own. They still do that.
Java might be another issue, but I've never bought into the "IE killed Netscape" meme. Netscape killed itself. The internet is the great equalizer. If you build it, they will come. Netscape simply didn't build it well enough.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
While Dvorak is usually an idiot and right for all the wrong reasons, or flat out wrong, there is an amount of truth in his analysis of IE.
Lacking, of course, is consideration for its purpose of destroying Netscape to preserve the MS Monopoly. Also, while he stands in 2006 and says that "intenet appliances" never happened, he neglects the role IE played in destroying web standards and making appliances practically impossible.
The thinking being that the Microsoft monopoly platforms would have to run what ever appliance applications were available, with IE, Microsoft was able to keep the APIs and systems subtally different from public APIs. While you could have coded internet appliance applications, it was very difficult. The IE version-o-matic of the late 90s kept *any* interesting content not based on ActiveX out of the mainstream.
So, in the end, the amazing MSnovation to prohibit actual "innovation" worked again.
But, yes, looking over the past 5 or 6 years, Microsoft injured computer innovation with IE, but could not kill it. The browser wars are back, and it is likely that Microsoft can't play the same game twice.
IE leaks memory in many cases when using closures with javascript - have they fixed it?
good insulating gloves and boots, in which case the fireworks show might make it even MORE fun.
What you don't realise is that Microsoft's BASIC probably gave you access to none of the power of that computer. AmigaBASIC is a prime example of this: the computer was capable of most of what a PC can do NOW, but yet this was about two decades ago. AmigaBASIC, microsoft's implementation of BASIC for it though, was the same old junk, with no thought or insight that would make it possible for new programmers to actually discover that power. Just compare Microsoft's AmigaBASIC with the alternative implementations, like AMOS, and you'll see what Microsoft promises are worth. A fulfilled promise isn't a lot to talk about, when the promise is so average.
If you take Dvorak's article and plug it into the Inauthentic paper detector mentioned in the article above this on the main page.
It finds that the text has been classified as INAUTHENTIC with a 25.7% chance of being authentic text.
I find that true for anything Dvorak says.
He hit the nail on the head... someone could get a MBA on that thesis point.
I teach a bunch of computer classes as part of my job. When I start talking about browsers, so many people start looking confused. I have to explain that Internet Explorer is one application used to surf the internet but there are others with different features. It never even crosses the minds of the majority of people to think that there can exist any other interface to the internet. The see internet explorer and have seen it always and assume it's the only interface possible. Because most people using computers aren't computer-literate. A big thing I emphasise is that these people are using computers, so they need to become literate in computer culture and start actually paying attention to geekdom, not because it interests them but because they NEED to know what a computer is and how to use it and that involves a lot more than just point and click.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
...and see if editors get a clue. Jeez
Maybe there is a configuration option I am missing or something but IE7 honestly seems very slow at times. Certain web pages I go to just are not loading very quickly. Such as this morning I opened http://www.usatoday.com/ thinking I would take IE7 out for a bit longer of a test drive. It took a longer ammount of time for the USAToday home page to load in IE7 than for me to get frustrated with the wait, open Firefox and start reading the details of a particular cover story article. By the way it did finally load but it took almost 35 to 40 seconds to do so. I am assuming there is a logical explaination though because that was so slow I cannot imagine anyone using IE7 if this were a comon occurance. However, I do like the new stripped down look of the interface though very simliar to firefox and opera.
Honestly i cannot decide which is my favorite browser but neither IE6 nor 7 are even in the running. Sometimes I use Opera other times I use firefox as each has small things I like about them more based off whatever it is I am currently doing. These days i pretty much only use IE if I go to a page that requires ActiveX support and it flashes up that my browser is unsupported by this site. By the way, to me those sites seem to be getting fewer and farther between all the time.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
isn't it common knowledge that Windows ME was Microsoft's biggest mistake ever?
Microsoft would not allow themselves to be dependent upon someone else for such a critical piece of their strategy.
Dont forget #2 Douglas Fir at 16" on center. So unless you have a 12 inch waste your ass isn't goign anywhere.
Bold text looks 'bolder', but regular text, with ClearType, looks like bold used to look with CT off.
Actually, ClearType text looks about as bold as it does in print. Print a page using the same physical font size that your web browser uses and compare it to the ClearType rendering. On the other hand, the hinted, non-antialiased 96dpi rendering that you're used to more than likely inaccurately represents the font's true stroke width. It has trained you to think that a 1px stroke is "plain" and a 2px stroke is "bold", when typography is in fact much more complicated than that.
But I do get a chuckle over him targeting IE...
Had MS not been slapped with lawsuit after lawsuit, keeping them from abusing their monopoly status, it would have been very easy for them to simply make IE not work with webservers using anything other than Windows. Businesses would have quickly dumped Apache as soon as they saw their online traffic slow to a crawl. Linux would have easily been crushed. I think IE was part of a much larger strategy that was, thankfully, killed by folks who saw it coming a mile away.
And believe it or not, Dvorak really did whine about System Idle Process hogging CPU time.
Here is my home page.
"[boys at M$] scrambling around like ants on a hot stove"
It was BillG, not Microsoft as a whole, that had the vision of the browser as the desktop.
p.s. Someone call PETA. Dvorak is torturing ants.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Wouldn't IE and all the Active-X and .net be useful in creating lock-in for IIS and Server 2003?
If ever two words deserved to be in the same sentence, it's "Outlook" and "Penetration".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It seems his record for bad explanations (and overhyped attention on /. ) is worse than Cringely's. Cringely at least most of the time has some support for his guesswork; Dvorak seems to just throw his crap out there like a kid throwing oatmeal at a wall to see what sticks.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Dvorak declaring the IE the biggest mistake of MS. Ok.
I declare that my cat is named Fluffy.
Question to the reader: Does either statement matter to you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If they forked Firefox and labeled it IE7 (or 8), who would they be dependent on? Their only obligation would be to release the source, which wouldn't hurt them as they give the software away for free anyway.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
No, IE did exactly and preciceley what it was designed to do. Crush Netscape. And it did a fairly good job of that, there is nothing left of Netscape other than a web portal with that name owned by AOL.
It was never intended for one second to be usable - you just had to use it regardless if you wanted it or not. IE 4 and Win98 forced it on to the desktop (the desktop BECAME IE) and every other function would open IE rather than your default browser. So of course as far as browser applications went it was a total disaster but that didn't matter.
Bill got what he wanted so it was hardly a "blunder".
A sense of audience is not the same thing as intelligence.
But in the world of work for hire, it is deemed unintelligent to shun money. And if pandering to your audience results in more income than actual intelligence about your subject matter...
That is of course assuming Netscape would have been able to ship a stable, working usable product. Maybe that would have been easier without the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. Netscape needed information on the Windows 95 API to ensure that Navigator would work well when it came out. Microsoft tried to strong-arm them into forgoing Navigator as a platform for developers. As a result, Netscape didn't get the API until two months after Windows 95's release, two months where Internet Explorer was bundled with the OS.
Bloody hell. That is amazing... if I was Dvorak, I would have all copies of that article destroyed, and change my name.
The internet is the great equalizer. If you build it, they will come.
So why are flatbed scanner manufacturers not necessarily "coming" to the task of producing SANE drivers for Free operating systems?
Microsoft would need to maintain it themselves. So what would that really get them? The web is written for IE, it would be a major amount of work to "downgrade" FireFox to emulate IE's bugs.
Additionally, a major downside is that it validates FireFox, a competitor.
"Dude where is the convention?"
This year it's in Vegas.
Seriously, it's a convention, not a standard, as practiced by the majority of web browsers and probably the majority of web sites. Of late it's been deconstructed to be just colored text within plain text, or underlined text, but blue/underlined is still a convention. Just like making your web site's logo also a link back to the home page is a convention.
Want a list of conventions and stats? See: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571102X
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I think Dvorak is right on this, which doesn't say much. I thought it was patently obvious. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though.
I don't understand why we even care about Dvorak's mindless columns. It's not that he doesn't "get it". It's that he actually doesn't care if what he says makes sense, is insightful, informative, or any of the other positive slashdot modifiers. I've become convinced that he intentionally writes nothing but flamebait in a bid to generate controversy and drive more people to his employer's site, increasing the ad revenue and other opportunities that come with eyeballs.
He's a carnival barker, and slashdot is his audience. Ignore him and he goes away. I wish there was a "Dvorak column" subject checkbox so I could uncheck it.
-----Chaz
"John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made."
Well I thought it was quite obvious with a giant E for it's icon indicating Error.
I can be done.
No one doubts that you can, sir. The question is, at what cost?
IE, like it, love it, or loath it, is the closest thing that browsers have come in the 15 some odd years they've been around to standards. Everything else has been playing catchup to match said standards, in the case of Netscape, even ignoring some standards to a point.
As memory serves, back about 8 years ago, I had a website with some simple stuff, just midi music at best, no flash, very primative material all in all. IE: Ran perfectly. Netscape: Ran okay, but if you opened it under Linux, instant crash to desktop for nothing more than the midi files. That, honestly, was ridiculous (considering the midi standard was around for what, almost 15 years prior to 1998?).
Now on the other hand, if the logic used by the mighty Dvorak is correct, Microsoft was in no way guilty of antitrust behavior, because in every instance of Windows shipped with Internet Explorer (or for that matter, Media Player, since both are about as vital to the "Windows Experience", running straight out of the box), was in fact the only way Microsoft could make back his alleged losses on developing Internet Explorer, Vista, et al.
And for the fact of the matter, everyone who is just getting into computers as a vital tool, is going to be wanting to use it straight out of the box, NOT spending a week or more looking up new tools that do the same thing (but with higher security), or spending weeks to months learning how to use Linux to satisfy the clamoring throngs of Linux zealots.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Article is a troll.
...that honor must go to ActiveX, for allowing IE to silently install and run third party software in the background, during what should be essentially a view-only process: reading a web page. Without ActiveX, you're not much worse off than if you're using Firefox or Opera. With ActiveX on, you're wide open.
I'd even go so far as to say that ActiveX is solely responsible for spyware and malware as a general idea. If the threat of spyware was limited to the occasional buffer overrun or other program bug, the general public wouldn't even know what spyware is. It never could have become the huge problem it is were it not for IE+ActiveX.
Nothing else comes close to the scourge this abortion of a technology has wrought.
ActiveX is evil and should be destroyed.
Not true. Opera is developed since 1995 (about the same time as IE). Mozilla is Netscape's project. So if there wasn't IE, we'd have... guess what, Firefox and Opera! Probably a lot more advanced websites using XHTML/CSS as well.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
IE is not a loss leader. Everyone who has windows pays for it. If the microsoft product is not strong enough to dominate the market by being sold, it gets bundled with the next version of windows and the price of windows goes up.
Does anyone really think there is any other way Microsoft come up with the ever increasing prices for their OS?
Eventually, windows will cost $700 and will be basically the same as it is now, just with yet another face lift to visibly show the difference. But hey, you get a full office suite as an integral part of the OS, what a bargain!!
Simon
Microsoft wasn't giving away IE free to get ad-revenue on their home page. Microsoft was giving IE away in hopes that they could translate a monopoly in the web browser market into a monopoly in the web server market. IE wasn't intended to make money off of end-users. It was intended to make money off of big corporations. In that sense, IIS sales should go on its profit-and-loss balance sheet.
The cake is a pie
Indeed, Firefox would be perfect for this because MS would not have to worry about negotiating a deal with the browser provider (i.e. Opera). The terms of the licensing agreement are already set in concrete.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
That would be true if both projects were non free kludges dependent on Bill Gates for funding. M$, for all it's billions, has a limit on what they spend to develop software.
The interesting part will be seeing how M$ explains their waste to Wall Street without admitting to anti-competitive practices. It's pretty clear they have some second rate stuff, Wall Street wants to know how they are going to keep selling it in the face of superior and free alternatives.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IE, like it, love it, or loath it, is the closest thing that browsers have come in the 15 some odd years they've been around to standards.
STANDARDS? You mean, like the actual, published standards for HTML/CSS/etc that Microsoft seems to completely ignore for their browser?
Thanks for the laugh.
I'd like to see M$ own up to such a strategy because it's against the law. It may be true and they have been convicted of it, but they had better not admit to it.
Dorvak's accusation forces M$ to admit anti-competitive practices or lose face on Wall Street. The second rate nature of both their browser and OS are now apparent. The only way to justify continued profits in the face of superior and less expensive competitors is to promise monopoly rents. Investors should be aware in either case. A company that screws it's customers is not much better to it's employees or investors.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So much for the bogus issue of retraining costs keeping people from using free software. People waiting for Vista should just put GNU/Linux on their current hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Whats this MSN I keep seeing everyone talk about in this thread?
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
You lost me.
MS licensed Mosaic. Talk to the creators of Mosaic if you want to assign blame.
Dvorak is right: the expense of IE development could have been spent elsewhere, and MS would be none the worse off if they bundled somebody else's browser.
Hmmm... tell that to Quicken or any number of other software apps which use IE for the UI solution. IE isn't just a browser - it's the HTML rendering component for the entire OS. And at the time it was first being developed, Netscape's HTML renderer wasn't componentized - which is yet another reason why they lost the browser wars and both AOL and Quicken went with IE instead of Netscape.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Ah yes, it's true the first web pages were seen in grey scale. The links were underlined and turned blue in color. It seemed to have worked then and it's still a choice most browsers give the user. Interfaces have moved on and some people have fun with successfully and not so successfully.
The M$ people have yet to catch up with the overall UI provided by Next. Window Maker is a much easier to use desktop than any version of Windows. Enlightenment is better than either.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That is what this is about. He who controls the browser market, determines how billions of people view a webpage. If your browser is the number one browser, you determine which technologies make it and in what form. You are also free to include things in that browser to track what people search for, what type of connection they have, and you can even do targeted ads toward that user.
Don't be so short sighted to think that Ia web browser is a trival thing. It is the means by which a company can control one of the greatest tools of commerce in the history of mankind.
The idea was pretty bold at the time - elimination of the OS (at least as it is currently conceived) on the desktop, no less. Everyone was on this bandwagon (IBM had the NetStation, Sun had their own network terminals and Java, SGI dabbled, etc). I even remember a couple of guys who built a "WebOS" for IE using Javascript and some backend magic (basically doing a crude form of what is termed AJAX today).
Microsoft went after this with a vengence because it would mean that their core product would be unnecessary - event their server OS would be unnecessary, because Netscape was supplying that as well in the form of the application server system. It was a business tactic that worked very well.
Unfortunately (regarless of the merits of such a "Web Operating System", etc) - Microsoft may have set back personal computing by a decade or so (to their profit, to be sure!). I mean, look at what is happenning today - we are looking at "Web 2.0" applications, AJAX, WebOS's are springing up again... I don't know if all of this is just solutions in search of a problem, or if it is an idea so "insanely great" that it must be made real, even if a certain business doesn't want it. Will it fall on it's face this time? I don't know - but I do wonder where we would be today if what was happenning yesterday could have been let go to fruition (or death, as the case might have been). Instead, we have had to wait 10 years (almost) to "try again"...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
They put it out at a loss but make it up in volume. Microsoft is no idiot.
Assuming all IE programmers get 100k salary (yeah, right) then 10^9 / 10^5 = 10000 Assuming a constant amount of IE programmers for 10 years yields 1000 IE programmers per year How else have they lost money besides salaries? Note that I only used ONE billion...so there's still room to put the other billions.
This guy fell out of touch a long time ago.
IE trouncing Netscape saved Microsoft's Windows monopoly from becoming irrelevent (or maybe it just delayed the inevitible).
Great, I've found a new project to work on while on my train-trips home: alter the Slashdotter firefox plugin so that it filters out any post containing the regex "[jJ]onh [dD]vorak". Also any post made by Zonk.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Microsoft isn't trying to be the OS company, they want to be the "computer" company... THE company. The real reason IE was introduced, for free, was to stomp out Netscape. Think about it. How big would Netscape be if IE hadn't come out? What other software would Netscape be working on? What other M$ markets would they be invading? 10 years latter, introduce Google. Swiftly thinking, M$ jumps into the search engine wars. Ooops, they're too late this time. Now Google is doing what M$ feared Netscape would have done.
Sorry, I smoked my last sig
FP was much better for everything but games. Integer basic was only better for games because it was first and had more games written for it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I actually saw (the result of) this access method about 25 years ago. The "bad guys" trolled an upscale neighborhood with a garage door code scanner. They got a hit on a house, backed a van into the garage, and closed the door from the inside. They used a chainsaw to extract the entire doorframe from the garage wall, and had pretty unrestricted access to the house at that point. They took a van's-worth of stuff and left, with nobody in the neighborhood seeing anything out of the ordinary. The cops suspect they used an electric chainsaw powered from the house - less noise that way.
While this was an upscale smash-and-grab, I thought it was pretty well thought out.
Dvorak is a green sandwich. You know, the sandwich you find at the back of your school locker on the last day of school in your grade three year. I could begin by listing his conceptual mistakes, but let's not, I'd rather save my fingers and forearms for my second career.
I'll just pick one. The ActiveX play was part of Microsoft's crusade to queer Sun's Java as the "write once, run anywhere" network-enabled desktop platform of the future. Highly successful, too. Now Java is better known as "write once, debug everywhere". The MS ploy to "embrace and extend" Java was more of a bear hug than it could handle.
Does Dvorak mention either Sun or Java in his childish tirade? Not once. Does Dvorak metion the seven billion dollars venture capital (IIRC) that gathered behind the Netscape storm cloud? Not once. No, Microsoft was too busy overreacting to butt nuggets like Dvorak, to hear him as he retells it.
Yesterday it was Microsoft loses money on Xbox 360.
Today it is Microsoft loses money on IE.
We are not talking about some little startup here that people are watching to see if they make any money. Microsoft is a huge company, they make billions of dollars. They can afford to make mistakes, they can afford to experiment, they can afford to do things that we will never understand their motivation behind.
So what if a couple things they do don't make money or don't make sense..
At my university, a secretary gave me a list of all the students in my class. The names were writtin in some fancy scripty font. I asked her to email me the file, so I could import it into a spreadsheet. When I got the file, I found it was a Word file, useless to me because my spreadsheet couldn't import those.
So I asked her if she could send it to me in ASCII. She didn't know what I was talking about. So I said I wanted plaintext.
So she sent me the SAME Word file. But the font had been changed to a more "normal" looking font.
This just in: Water is wet.
My user CSS ensures that links are underlined. This is forced on. Otherwise, I get to play magic wand. Ditto for image links: if it's an image, it has a bright, blue border around it. Then I don't have to play magic cursor.
I have seen too many people, "is that a link?" (mouses over it, clicks at it), "I guess not."
I like taking the guessing out of the web. You can even set your user CSS so that you have to click on a flash before it can play! It's great.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
One of the key datums in marketing is...
The plural of datum is data.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That didn't stop MS from trying.
http://outcampaign.org/
Much of Windows uses the MSHTML engine.
IE also uses it.
But IE does a lot more stuff. The stuff that is most problematic (aside from buffer overflow-type problems which happen all over in most OSs) is how it is tied to the Windows Scripting Host and the security model it uses to determine who can do what in which context. It also exposes an intractible number of APIs to audit.
There were a couple real bad remote exploits that hit the MSHTML engine but not nearly as many as IE overall.
Most problems that people run into browsing the internet and getting drive-by-hacked have to do with IE's not-so-consistent treatment of content from untrusted sources -- and then there's the issue of the LSP framework (something that should never have been introduced) -- the LSP should have at least had a very clear exposure to user space [i.e. control panel] so that changes to it could be detected.
So it's not so much IE that's the security problem. It's all the bits and pieces that get tied together by it without enough thought or adequate protection.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Microsoft is undoubtedly a nasty company in many regards, a bully in the software industry. But Netscape, in the way the company was evolving, was just another nasty company with the smug assuption that they 'owned' the web market. Andreessen got up at the podium on a number of occasions and 'waved a red flag' at the Microsoft bull, boasting that web apps would take away Microsoft's desktop dominance. And Netscape was moving in that direction, adding proprietary tags and features to their browser that were tightly integrated with their Web Server technology.
In one sense, Microsoft stomping Netscape saved us from the Monster that Netscape was becoming. Which is an obvious mixed blessing, because of the Monster Microsoft already was.
But let's get over the warm-fuzzy feelings for Netscape. They were not a non-profit, and their code was very closed. In actuality, we probably have Microsoft to thank for the open-sourcing of Netscape (which, of course, just served as a base and impetus for Mozilla, as the rotting Netscape code had mostly to be thrown away).
"I keep Windows for testing sites in IE"
[billg@redmond ~/.wine/c/Program Files/Internet Explorer]$ wine iexplore.exe
Even after the problems I had compiling wine with 64 bit linux and installing IE 5, 5.5 and 6 (the installers use legacy 16 bit code which breaks under 64 bit *nix), I found it worth the effort. I can do all my browser compatability testing (MSIE, Firefox (windows), Firefox (linux) Konquorer (for KHTML as used in safari)) on one platform. For those of you running 32 bit linux, if you can't get IE running properly then it is time to turn in your geek card and buy an XP licence!
IE is not an excuse to keep windows.
Thanks to the Wine Developers Developers Developers at http://winehq.org/ for the great work!
I know it's wrong, but I just love reading Dvorak's columns when he blathers on about apocalyptic doom for Microsoft.
shiver :)
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I don't know if people remember the pre IE days. Back then browsers weren't free and you didn't have much choice. I give MS credit where credit is due, without MS having a web strategy then the web as we know it today would still be a hobbyist toy and would not have gained the momentum it did.
Dvorak seems to sometimes make irrational claims to get attention (think the 'Will Apple Adopt Windows?' although bootcamp came close) but seems to get one right here. The msn.com connection is something to think about though...
I can't think of how many times I wanted to mod somebody (-1, Wrong).
-gjr
Looking at raw numbers, this may be true, but, and here comes the but - IE managed to tie many organizations to Windows, and this makes changing to another OS next to impossible for such organizations.
look at the bigger picture.
Omry.
Step 3:
instead of patching IE holes and leaks, allow spyware market to develop and thrive.
Step 4:
Introduce MS-branded solution to these problems
___
No sig is good enough for the moment...
So... flamebait? That's just a subset of troll.
/. and state that the audience defines the moderations ...
...
/.er, who believes everything that he/she has written and deserves to be modded into oblivion because of it.
Actually, no, it's not. Or it shouldn't be. Unless you take a postmodern view of
In theory, a troll is a comment that is deliberately written to provoke a response from the uninformed members of the audience who are reading. Writing is a good troll is an art form, and is most certainly not simply an assinine comment - it should be clear to the more clued readers that the author does not, in fact, agree with the outrageous statements he/she is making
In comparison, flamebait is your typical assinine comment. It's just a dumb post made by a dumb
ZOMG!!!11!! He's right!!!!11!! It's taking 98 % of my resources - I'm going to have to reboot!
you have to love John Dvorak who dismisses strategy that he doesn't understand.
John fails to reognize that Microsoft is fully aware of what they spend on nonrevenue generating products and that they could and do spend 10s of millions of dollars on programs that never see the light of day. for every IE you see, there are 100 more that never make it into beta. to say its the biggest mistake is to suggest that they couldn't lose a few billion and not flinch.
this also suggests that Dvorak doesn't understand software devlopment, where hiring more code monkeys doesn't get your product done better or quicker.
Ha ha, how is this flamebait? It's hilarious! Not to mention true!
If it was running slower then ti would still be right twice a day. He was making some kind of point that just because something is right once, doesnt mean it will always be right. I dont know why he was saying it, and his post appeared to have nothing to do with its parent, but meh. Only if it was working perfectly in sync with the solar system (eg at the exact right speed), but was off the real time by a certain amount of time (but not exactly an hour, otherwise it would be 'right' in a different time zone) would it never be right again.
:/
I need to go do some work and stop feeding trolls
which is totally what she said
Is that to ensure that no-one huffs and puffs and blows your house in?
Xenu loves you!
True enough but I can't help feeling they have lost focus. They developed IE ot "take over the web" but that's failed. What are they developing IE for now? I think they developed IE7 simply to save face.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
At least some versions run under Wine, I think.
A market percentage of around 90% is not having taken over the Web?
;-)
Pardon me
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
of that 90% how many are people who would know what internet explorer was? maybe 10%? The rest don't click on the IE icon, they "start the Internut". When I consulted, myself and the other techs would change the browser to firefox and change the icon to IE and no one ever noticed.
If it was running slower then ti would still be right twice a day.
You aren't right even once a day.
A NON-RUNNING clock is correct twice a day, a slow clock is right only when the degree of slowness is an even multiple of 12 hours.
A clock that loses 1 second per minute (i.e., takes 61 seconds to indicate one minute elapsed) will be one second off at one minuts, two seconds off at two minutes, etc.
The number of seconds in 12 hours is 43200, so it would take that number of minutes for the actual time to match the indicated time. that is 43200 minutes, or 720 hours, or 30 days before a clock that lost one second per minute would again indicate the correct time.
A clock with an AM/PM indicator would take twice as long, or 60 days to again indicate the correct time.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
I guess I was thinking of slow as just being verrrry slow (as in basically stopped anyway), rather than a second or so slow.
which is totally what she said
I don't know if people remember the pre IE days.
Yes, I do. I remember GEnie, CompuServe, and BBS software. I remember Gopher, Veronica, and Archie. I remember xmodem to get files, and how Kermit was so impressive in its' ability to RESUME an interupted download, instead of restarting. I remeber upgrading to a 1200 baud modem and being amazed at the speed increase over my old 300 baud modem.
Back then browsers weren't free and you didn't have much choice.
Wrong. When the HTTP protocol was proposed, there were many implementations available, many for free. Remember that the protocol was being developed at public institutions and was almost always dependent on government support so was REQUIRED to be public domain. Some took the PD material and incorporated it into propriatary software (from the information contained in IE6.0 - "NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.")
without MS having a web strategy then the web as we know it today would still be a hobbyist toy and would not have gained the momentum it did.
You see it half full, I see it half empty. The World Wide Web was a rock pushed off a cliff; it had momentum and impetus of its own BEFORE MS got involved in trying to hijack it for MS's profit. MS was a Johnny-come-lately to the web party, and only was able to join the dance by fairly underhanded means - they "licensed" a product from Spyglass (Mosaic) on a percentage-of-each-perchase-price basis then BUNDLED it with their OS - so Spyglass got a percentage of ZERO and went out of business.
You are correct, MS had a web strategy; take over the internet so distributed computing and Java programming could not interfere with their OS monopoly. I would not say that there was a vision of the future they were trying to attain, rather a potential future they saw but were trying to block off.
I would maintain that the web-as-we-know-it exists DESPITE MS's efforts to derail it.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
You are 100% wrong. Before IE even existed I had NCSA Mosaic on my Windows 3.1 system. Later, long before IE was really usable, I had Netscape Navigator 2.0 on my Slackware Linux system - but Netscape 1.x predates IE, too. And let's face it, before Netscape invented tables, you could write a web browser as a shell script wrapped around telnet :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, ActiveX not DirectX. Brain fart. Oops.
I've got DirectX on the brain lately...been writing an application that uses it and it got stuck in my head. Ah well - you know what I meant. :)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Ever see a clock broken that ran fast? You can sometimes find a broken clock that's correct several times per hour. :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I don't know who made it or why.
Man, you really need that seminar!
^_^ Then, of course, there are digital clocks. There was a Star Trek book that made fun of that. "Even a broken chronometer is right twice a day, Data." "Really? I would think that a broken chronometer would not display and therefore it would never be right." "It's an old Earth saying, Data. I... don't know why they would say that, really."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.