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.'"

Comments

Microsofts biggest blunder?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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...

Re:Microsofts biggest blunder?

[jambarama]

From my blog: http://jambarama.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-microsof t-got-ie-to-be-de-facto.html

Why did Microsoft care what browser people used?
Operating systems can be replaced by higher level operating systems. BIOS stood for (used to, they changed it in the 90s) basic integrated operating system. BIOS was a full on (but limited) OS. Microsoft figured out how to use BIOS to boot DOS, a higher level OS. Later they figured out how to get DOS to boot Windows. Thus they knew operating systems could be replaced, they'd done it: BIOS > DOS > Windows (until they jettisoned DOS in 2000).

They were afraid the internet was going to do this again. And Netscape would be basically an OS on top of Windows. The problem was this: if everyone develops for Netscape, not for Windows, then Windows wouldn't matter (just like who makes your BIOS doesn't matter now). Microsoft was terrified that Windows would get built over. Then they couldn't charge much for Windows (because it wouldn't be that important). So they did their darndest to kill Netscape and force IE on everyone else.

Getting rid of the Apple Problem
Macintosh threatened to throw a wrench in their plans. Even if Apple went out of business, someone would buy it up and still offer Macs. Because there was another viable platform, many early developers felt they should work for compatibility with both Mac and Windows. There was no IE for Macintosh and even if there had been, Microsoft needed a way to get Mac users to use it. If IE wasn't default for all major platforms, IE wouldn't be the standard, it would be a standard.*

Luck was on Microsft's side. They had been killing Apple's revenue for sometime and Apple was willing to partner with anyone to survive. For Microsoft it was worth $150 million to make IE the de facto standard that it remains to this day. For Apple is was worth accepting IE to survive to try and fight again.

So what about Netscape?
Tying means using one product to sell another. Tying is like selling a copier and forcing (contractually or with technology) the consumer to get the copier serviced by you as well. This example is an actual case - Kodak did this. Tying is not bundling (for example selling Office rather than Excel or Powerpoint alone. Bundling is fine). Tying is per se illegal - if you are found to be tying, you are wrong, no debate - bundling is fine.

I don't think there was any doubt in Microsoft's mind that bolting IE to the OS was "tying." The problem for Microsoft was that permanently bolting IE to Windows (and making it default) was the only way to unseat the current king of the internet, Netscape. It worked. And then they got slapped with an anti-trust suit for guess what... tying.

During the trial a Princeton computer scientist got the Windows code via a court order and found that by removing two lines of code (from the source of Win98) you could get rid of IE. So Netscape presented this in court. Microsoft's rebuttal was a video, showing that by removing these two lines of code Windows crashed. When the prosecutors looked into this they found this was two different videos spliced together (thanks Ballmer). Guess what?

They were found guilty. Judge Penfield Jackson was furious. He'd been annoyed by Bill Gates' irritated deposition. Gates had been ornery and not very helpful, but this put Jackson over the top. So Jackson wrote a scathing decision and Microsoft was supposed to be split into three companies. Because this decision was so harsh when the change of administration came, they refused to enforce it.

So Microsoft won. They got IE to be the standard everyone uses when developing for the web and no penalties for it (if you don't think IE is the de facto standard, make your site incompatible with IE and, unless it is slashdot, don't expect to get much return traffic). Microsoft now has new pressure again - from alternate web browsers and from alternate operating systems. But there is a new savior on the horizon for them - trusted computing. If they succeed with the vendor lock-in trusted computing allows they'll never go out of business.

Why not make it the ultimate test of .NET?

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:Definitely not 0 profit...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

From the tagging:

troll, dvorak (ie stupid idiot)

Is anybody else noticing how many aricles are being tagged "troll"? Won't make for a very good indexing mechanism is every third article has the same keyword...