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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.'"
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.
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
Dvorak doesn't understand business. IE is a loss leader. You give out IE in order to get other stuff back. This is the kind of thing we live with all the time in marketing. Our department always "loses" money, but without our department, the business wouldn't have any customers... so are we a money sink? Dvorak, apparently, would say yes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Text links should be underlined. That's the convention.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
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.
If I had mod points I'd mod you up - the Internet Explorer 7 interface is atrociously bad. I am not a Microsoft basher (I don't love them, but I find it hard to work up a good hate for them too), but this design will confuse the hell out of people. What's with eliminating the standard menus that every other Windows program uses? This will just confuse the hell out of users, without any countervailing benefit!
The interface for IE 7 was not thought through at all.
Microsoft bundles IE with Windows to leverage Windows' monopoly to gain marketshare for IE. Once IE has high marketshare, then Microsoft can control indirectly the website developers. Have you ever noticed how many websites are written to accommodate the bugs in IE?
Features, man, they're FEATURES!!
Because we all know that the only problem with Vista was that there wasn't enough people working on it...
"Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows"
Technically, that's incorrect.
Current exterior wall construction for a large portion of the housing market consists of (from the outside-in)vinyl siding, Tyvek vapor barrier, a fibrous type sheathing (sometimes no more than 1/8" thick cardboard), glass fiber insulation, and gypsum wallboard. All of these material are easily cut with a $1.99 utility knife.
You can get into most houses these days with a knife and 5 minutes by going right through the wall.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
Impossible.
:)
Microsoft has testified in court that IE cannot be separated from the "Core OS", whatever that means.
Therefore, what you say cannot be true
QED
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Well, here's another thing: Five years ago people said, "We can't migrate from Windows; all our stuff runs on Office, or some Windows-specific app." Now people say, "We can't migrate from Windows, all our web apps use Active-X controls and can only run on IE."
Chris Mattern
As with most things in life, a good gas powered chain saw will do the job in a tenth of the time, and it's a lot more fun.
Just make sure there aren't any electrical conduit where you're making your hole. That might make it less fun.
The profit there was HUGE. It still is.
Billions? Easily.
Keeping people from looking at alternatives in one field helps keep them from looking at alternatives in other fields, like their biggest cash cow - the office suite.
Now that the browser isn't sufficient to keep people locked in (and now that browser-based apps are a threat to their underlying platofrm monopoly), they wish it would die, so they can lock people in with their latest strategy - dot.net. That's why, originally, there wasn't going to be an IE7.
You can get into most houses these days with a knife and 5 minutes by going right through the wall.
5 minutes is 4 minutes and 50 seconds too long in a yard with a 120lb mastiff on the prowl.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Microsoft would not allow themselves to be dependent upon someone else for such a critical piece of their strategy.
I'm a Microsoft employee, so maybe I can shed a little bit of light on IE. I didn't work here when IE was developed, that was all way before my time, but from a cultural/business perspective, Microsoft is big on the idea of Ownership. You Own a project. You Own the code you write (or you Own your non-code deliverables, if you're not a programmer). If it's screwed up, you're the one person someone can come to and ask "How did this happen?" because you Own that item.
:)
Yes, Microsoft could have perfectly well bundled Netscape with Windows (or even bought Netscape with pocket change) back in the 1990s and probably have done so for far less than the cost of developing IE. I think buying Netscape (in which case Netscape's web servers could have become IIS) would be the only way it would have been considered. Why we didn't go that way is an interesting question. I have no idea what the answer is.
You may have noticed that Microsoft isn't big on bundling others' software, and when they do, it's always fully branded and user-transparent. I think acquiring Netscape is the only way anyone would have considered bundling it as the official Windows browser. Who knows? Maybe we did approach Netscape about either a buyout or a branding deal and they told us to get stuffed? I've never heard anything like that, and it's not often that a company declines to be acquired by Microsoft, but I suppose it's not impossible.
Now, combine that lack of enthusiasm for bundling third-party products with the culture of Owning what you work on, and you get why (in my opinion) Microsoft would not have bundled Netscape unless it owned the company lock, stock, and barrel: you could technically lay any security problems at Netscape's feet, but our corporate culture wouldn't want to. Plus, even if we did, our customers wouldn't buy that. They'd say "You shipped it, it's your problem. Don't tell me to email Netscape for support." Anybody's customers would say that. If you sold it to them, you'd better be able to support it, even if it's a third-party product.
Finally, there's a lot of "not invented here" syndrome that runs around our company. It seems to me (I'm fairly new here, so if you've been around longer, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) if we don't have it, we're either going to buy someone who does have it or we're going to write it ourselves.
IE has certainly had its problems over the years, and has of late been feature-poor compared to other browsers. Heck, until IE 7 betas started coming out, I even used other browsers unless someone was watching, and I still most often do because I'm very used to Firefox now. However, IE 7 is honestly a good browser. Beta 1 was usable, beta 2 is slick, and both are extremely fast, render well, and have a good, minimal interface. And finally, they support tabs! That was the huge missing feature. The first time I ever used a tabbed browser was the last time I could stand to not use one. It's just that much better. IE 7 is going to be very good. Far fewer windows users will find themselves with a reason to install Firefox instead of IE7. I expect Firefox will rise to the challenge and also become better and faster and it will benefit the industry as a whole, but there's no question about it: IE 7 is raising the bar.
Overall, do I think IE was a mistake? No. It's true that I'm a n00b here, but as others have pointed out, IE was a good loss leader for our business that allows us to generate revenue in other areas, such as MSN. Was bundling it in the OS a mistake? Well, that's another issue . I hear there's a lot of decoupling of IE in Vista. You be the judge
Notes: I don't work on either IE or Windows, so my opinions are reasonably objective, but they do tend to support our products over the competition, naturally enough.
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