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Microsoft Busting Its Own Browser+OS Myth
An anonymous reader writes "Longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley used her Redmond magazine column this month to point out that after years of arguing that the browser is 'inextricably linked' to the operating system, the company's current push to get users to drop IE 6 for newer versions, plus IE's separate release schedule, are disproving its own argument. From the article: 'Microsoft has insisted that its browser is part of Windows, and, ironically, that's coming back to haunt the company. Customers can mix and match different versions of IE with different versions of Windows. ... But Microsoft has done very little to get this message out there. I'd argue this is because it makes plain the absurdity of the company's claims that IE is part of Windows.'"
I don't think that anyone disbelieved Microsoft when they claimed that IE had been made part of the OS. No one is really calling that a myth. The supposed myth is that it had to be part of the OS, and that Microsoft could not make a meaningful distinction between the browser and the OS.
Still, we can argue about whether Microsoft claimed such a thing or whether it really is a "myth".