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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Why, yes, he's all of those things!!
Amazing this new fangled technology -- how does it know?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Isn't IE a critical component of Windows Vista? :-)
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
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)
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
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.
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.
This is the first sensible statement, and the first intelligent article that I have read from John Dvorak in the last twenty years.
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.
What are their UI people smoking? Or did they hire some Opera UI people?
Opera is the most customisable interface I've ever encountered, and not just browsers.
Fair play. I was referring more to the IE7 interface compared with the goofy default layout of Opera's UI. You're very correct in how customizable Opera's UI is - although it's often EXTREMELY obfuscated as to how to customize many things. Nevertheless, what you want to customize can almost always be done in Opera, though it'll take some requests for help in the forums.
Not so with IE7, as far as I can tell. I can add, remove, and rearrange stuff on the toolbar, but I can't move the toolbar into different locations, as I could with previous versions of IE.
I'm hoping this isn't the final UI form. If it is, then it's taken several large steps backwards in UI customizability from previous versions of IE.
It's not like it's a big deal to me, since even with all its nifty new features (well, new to IE), I'll still be using Firefox, but the ClearType issue fucking up font display is going to mess with the usability of some of the sites I've designed, which is really irritating.
As far as Opera, I'm eagerly awaiting the final release of 9. I'm hoping I can customize it enough to use it as my main email client, as I freaking hate Thunderbird (and Outlook and Outlook Express, and, and, and...) I'd like the Hugin and Munin scripts updated for version 9.
It's a bad business strategy. Make 5 billion now instead of 10 billion in 20 years.
How is that a bad business strategy? If you can get even a 4% annual return on that 5 billion you'll come out ahead.
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
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.
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
Stupid idiots have low WIS and INT scores. Smart idiots have high INT but low WIS.
</nerd>
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
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.
And believe it or not, Dvorak really did whine about System Idle Process hogging CPU time.
Here is my home page.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
That didn't stop MS from trying.
http://outcampaign.org/
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.