they probably just went with the first developer who could impress them with some cheap Flash and a lot of impressive-sounding jargon... which was probably a bunch of metaphors involving "trucks" and "tubes".
The last time I tried to use Microsoft Word (2003 version) it crashed and destroyed my document. I literally cannot imagine how bad something has to be in order to do that. I was also told that OOo probably could have retrieved the corrupted document, but I restarted with reStructured Text. It took a third of the time to redo the document and get something that looked good.
I'm convinced that Word processing as a concept has totally failed. I'm not talking desktop publishing, but simply writing a simple document. Microsoft Word has become so grotesquely overburdened with features, many of which are, for all intents and purposes, completely nondeterministic in their behavior, at least to a non-expert user. OOo Write is substantially better, and I found it to be quite usable, and certainly spent an order of magnitude less time struggling to get a fairly simple document with some nice formatting and simple tables than it did when I tried to do the same thing in Word. Frankly, I think the only kind of "word processing" that anyone should use is markup. Anything with a GUI that I have every used (except Wordpad... I like Wordpad, it does one simple thing well, like good software is supposed to) is a wholly inefficient to create documents.
If I hired a company and they delivered Microsoft Word, I would consider their work not just unacceptable but criminally negligent. I literally cannot understand how people can tolerate to use it, and it is a tribute to the incredible power that Microsoft wields as a monopoly that something this horrible and poorly designed is the most popular word processor.
However, despite my superlative rhetoric, I consider Lotus Notes even worse.
It's already happened. My wife was collaborating with someone on a Powerpoint presentation for a class. When she got the PowerPoint file, PowerPoint gave some utterly cryptic message about the registry when trying to open it. To make a long story short, and no thanks to Microsoft, I found out it was a PowerPoint 95 file, which Microsoft no longer supports, and as is typical of their utter laziness and contempt for users their piece of crap software doesn't tell you this, but rather gives you a completely meaningless error message, leading you to believe the file might be corrupt (it wasn't), or the software was messed up (it wasn't, at least according to Microsoft's abysmal standards of "correct").
It turns out I had to find an archived version of the PowerPoint 97 viewer in order to let my wife load the file. So Microsoft already doesn't support their own formats, and this is using their software, paid for. With this level of complete incompetence and disdain for customers, naturally they want a subscription model. They haven't done anything to Office in more than 10 years that 95% of their users want or need, so how else are they going to keep making money while shovelling out the same half-working barely-usable garbageware. And don't get me started on Word which is definitely the second, and maybe the third or more most compatible software for its own format.
Similar thing with Windows XP. It worked. Its worst deficiencies had all been corrected or at least improved. There was no possible way Vista could complete with a product that people were happy with, so they shoved out Vista while it was still half-baked and then will simply hit everyone up for another upgrade when Vista is finally finished (er, Windows 7). Microsoft simply cannot make money any more by providing good products and adding improvements and new features over time, so they need some other way to extort the cash they couldn't earn in a truly free market.
Another sidenote: Because of government subsidies, in the year 2000 almost all Swedes below the age of 65 had a computer at home. Unfortunatly, I don't think that it is the case anymore, but all Swedes still have gratis acces to computers through public libraries. It's good to be part of the developed part of the world.
In the U.S.A., computers are cheap enough that almost anyone with even a little motivation can have them. Plus all Americans have free access to computers through public libraries. Plus, the government didn't waste billions of dollars giving free computers to a bunch of people that would never use them. Just because our government doesn't provide a womb-like existence to us doesn't mean we aren't developed. Sweden does some things better than the U.S.. The U.S. does some things better than Sweden. I think you should check your elitist attitude at the login prompt.
Well, I _was_ joking. The difference is that so many of the problems of Windows have nothing to do with technical difficulties, bugs that naturally occur in any complex software, etc, and more to do with the sheer arrogance of Microsoft, its unwillingness to do things it should do and the utter contempt it has for its customers.
No software is perfect but when Microsoft's biggest competitor is its old products, and it's been reduced to sabotaging its old products (by, say, refusing to sell them when they are still highly in demand), they have reached a point where more effort, by far, is being put into maintaining their monopoly, and thus their cashflow, by means _other_ than trying to sell good products, outperform the competition or engage in anything resembling free market behavior. Microsoft doesn't compete (if they ever did) because they can't compete. They can only strongarm, cheat and generally be bullies and thugs. That's all they know how to do.
If this were a fair fight, I'd cut MS some slack, because they do some things well, or at least used to. But they cheat. They lie. The steal. They extort. They are just a big evil corporation that, in my opinion, causes far more harm to the industry than the good they may have once produced and is stifling innovation and just generally making life worse. There's a difference between playing hardball to win in business and generally being a spoiler and a complete boat anchor to the cause of technology.
Once upon a time, things were better for users because Microsoft existed. Bill Gates had a dream of having a PC on every desktop. That dream was achieved, but Microsoft no longer contributes to the state of the art. Now they harm it. They do just do everything they can to sell more software than the other guy. They do everything they can to lock customers into their software prison. They do everything they can to keep the other guy from selling software. They do everything they can so no one can compete with them.
Given all that, I have a hard time being critical of anyone who isn't Microsoft, even if I should be.
When Ubuntu is competing against an OS which has been a vector for millions of computers to be compromised over the last 10+ years and has caused untold billions of dollars of damage and wasted billions of hours of people's time, I think it's not a bad track record.
A Circuit City just opened in our town (yes, as amazing as that sounds) and I went in there once or twice and the sheer waste of floor space is amazing. I can see how they went out out of business... they don't bother to carry any stock except the most basic items. They used to have a decent music and movie selection, and now you're lucky if the product on the shelf is even sorted.
Well, clearly there is no "vision" at places like Microsoft where the OS takes longer to boot that it did 10 years ago and the same app takes as long to start up as it did 20 years ago.
Frankly, if you told me 20 years ago that computers would in the late 2000s take 1-2 minutes to boot (for the short time I used Vista on a very capable machine it took 7 minutes to boot after a single OS update), and that Word takes between 30-60 seconds just to load or that Outlook freezes for 15-30 seconds every time I unminimize it or click on a folder, I would have told you you were crazy.
(Of course, I also would have expected to see fully-blown natural language processing, voice recognition and Duke Nukem Forever...)
Despite all the advances in speed and capability, our computers today are doing many of the same tasks no faster, and even more slowly than they did when they ran at 100th the speed with 1000th the memory and 10000th as much disk space.
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems.
That's a great start. The problem is that Microsoft will simply subvert the standards process to its own ends and become the de facto standard. They've done it before.
Microsoft only likes standards when it can define the standard.
Other than that, I would highly support the concept.
I think they do understand that. However, they also understand that "good enough" is better than "nothing", which makes me wonder why you are complaining.
I've always adhered to the maxim to never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, but in recent years, I've come strongly to believe that that no longer works for Microsoft.
You know this could all be done without burdening the user with two of the most annoying and crappy pieces of software technologies on the planet, ActiveX and Java. But that assumes the people involved don't hold their users in utter contempt.
Why does everything from Microsoft turn into a kick in the nuts to the user?
The irony of the Beatles' music was that while so much of it sounded simple, it was much more complex that it seemed. In fact, I've found it's an incredible and rare talent to make complex music, but it's even more incredible and rare to make complex music that doesn't sound complex. It works on more levels for more people, and I think that's one of the reasons why people (including me) revere the music of the Beatles as much as they do:
They broadened the boundaries of "pop" music incredibly, helping to lay much of the groundwork for music of the next decade, and at the same time were sowing the seeds for the "art rock" progressive music movement that also thrived in the 70s.
Also, strangely enough, I can't find a single person above 15 who likes 2000's music. Why is that?
If you're referring to popular music, no question: It sucks.
However, as someone who is 43, if I were to rate my Top N favorite albums of all time, probably 40% of them would be from the 2000s... but not anything you'd ever hear on the radio (except maybe occasionally on some odd channels on satellite). There's just as much "good" music being made as there always was, if not more, but the media hegemony has almost completely walled it off from the traditional outlets (radio, etc).
Despite my broad interests in music (rock, progressive, blues, jazz, electronic), the only radio that I care to listen to is talk, classical and the occasional program on public radio.
I've heard that average radio station has a playlist of some 400 songs. My Neuros II has about 13000 songs (all legally acquired, mind you). What would _you_ choose?
It was on the edge of my tongue but I couldn't place the context until you finished the line. On one hand, I'm disappointed I didn't get the exact reference right away. On the other hand, it would have bugged me all day.
Thanks.
p.s. I've been listening to digital Beatles for 20 years. Dunno what all the fuss is about... now.
Well, now that I think of it, it's kind of like Windows. The basic OS is OK, but all the utilities are really crappy. However, there are plenty of third-party utilities that solve the glaring problems.
Still, it would be nice if Microsoft, with their tens of thousands of employees, tens of billions of dollars and tens of IQ points worth of management could come up with something better than "pathetic" for these basic utilities. After paying all that money it would be nice not to have to pay more just to get basic useful functionality.
Of course, I stick with free software these days. It's not always perfect, but it's much more flexible, usually better, and it's not made by people who have nothing but contempt for me.
I'll agree with you there. I have a Pocket PC that runs WinCE 2002 and it was a total joke. Pocket Word was worse than useless because it would totally lock up opening anything bigger than a tiny document and was absurdly slow when it actually did work. "Closing" a program would actually "minimize" it and switching between open apps meant either launching it again or no fewer than 7 stylus clicks to switch among the open apps. It was like all the bad ideas from the PDA world and none of the good features of the Windows world. Well, at least the thing booted in about 3 seconds.
Still with the Gower reader, a copy of Age of Empires (despite it's totally impotent AI), PocketUFO and that weird Korean WinAmp clone, I've gotten plenty of value out of the thing.
If I had to pick the worst software I've ever used it would be Lotus Notes and a close second would be Microsoft Word. The best would have to be (among many things, 4NT, MS Visual Studio 6, Windows 2000 (if you don't count Explorer) and Firefox).
Look at the About box in IE... they give credit to NCSA among others because, ta da, IE was derived from stuff they did. Netscape paved the way until it collapsed under its own bloat and IE became the browser of choice, and then proceeded to stagnate for the better part of a decade. Then came Firefox and Opera and Microsoft was once again forced to play catch-up.
Let's face it, "catch up" is the only thing Microsoft has ever done.
It's not the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft, that would be keeping Steve Ballmer in charge indefinitely.
However, they lose leverage when significant portions of the population aren't using their browser. Remember, they can only compete through unfair means, they are too stagnant, too bloated and too atrophied to actually produce software that isn't years behind everyone else... all they can do is lie, cheat and steal marketshare. However, they are very good at that and have the resources, the willpower and the chutzpah to keep doing that for many years. Who's going to stop them? The Department of Justice? They are in MS's pocket as much as anyone.
Microsoft will hobble along for many more years, if not decades, before they become completely irrelevant as a business, but in terms of the state of the art, they haven't been relevant for years. Their only technological success these days is wholly based on their formerly good products that have been unnecessarily "upgraded" into the hopeless, obsolete mess they remain today, but are still shipped on 99% of computers sold, because, hey, they can force it.
If I were in charge, I would dump Vista and everything that reeks of the stink of it and go back to XP SP3 and start over. Take a product people actually like and want to use and move on, rather than trying to triage a product that almost no one wants and doesn't offer anything over XP. But that's me. I've used almost every Microsoft OS going back to DOS 1.1, and while a few upgrades were painful (DOS 3.0, Windows 95, NT 4.0 SP2 come to mind), they were generally really good (even when I wasn't expecting it) until Vista. That was the one that pushed me to Linux full time, and I haven't looked back.
Well, I'm not entirely optimistic yet. Sure, Microsoft is losing on features, quality and security... no duh. They are beyond the point where they can actually put out a decent product that doesn't all but collapse under its own corpulence. On the other hand, Microsoft didn't become the biggest and most powerful software company based on features, quality and security.
Sooner or later they are going to start fighting back (and I don't mean that feeble, half-hearted IE8), and they never fight clean.
Although it does sound a bit anti-Microsoft on Google's part
So what. You don't think Microsoft wouldn't shiv them in the back every chance they get. They've only been doing it for 30 years and deserve much more than this little taste of their own medicine.
And no, I don't consider this "being evil".
Not only does Microsoft richly deserve this (i.e., real competition), but it's a service to users by helping to improve the Internet ecology as a whole, as the millions of users that are most likely to be pwned over are now being directly told to switch to software that isn't hopelessly insecure. If some people pay the price for allowing themselves to be locked in to the prison that is Microsoft software, well, hopefully they'll learn their lesson.
"Works with IE" is perfectly OK, "Requires IE" is stupid and evil.
Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction.
You're right we're offended... because that's a stupid and ignorant claim.
Slashdot Mirror
they probably just went with the first developer who could impress them with some cheap Flash and a lot of impressive-sounding jargon ... which was probably a bunch of metaphors involving "trucks" and "tubes".
The last time I tried to use Microsoft Word (2003 version) it crashed and destroyed my document. I literally cannot imagine how bad something has to be in order to do that. I was also told that OOo probably could have retrieved the corrupted document, but I restarted with reStructured Text. It took a third of the time to redo the document and get something that looked good.
I'm convinced that Word processing as a concept has totally failed. I'm not talking desktop publishing, but simply writing a simple document. Microsoft Word has become so grotesquely overburdened with features, many of which are, for all intents and purposes, completely nondeterministic in their behavior, at least to a non-expert user. OOo Write is substantially better, and I found it to be quite usable, and certainly spent an order of magnitude less time struggling to get a fairly simple document with some nice formatting and simple tables than it did when I tried to do the same thing in Word. Frankly, I think the only kind of "word processing" that anyone should use is markup. Anything with a GUI that I have every used (except Wordpad... I like Wordpad, it does one simple thing well, like good software is supposed to) is a wholly inefficient to create documents.
If I hired a company and they delivered Microsoft Word, I would consider their work not just unacceptable but criminally negligent. I literally cannot understand how people can tolerate to use it, and it is a tribute to the incredible power that Microsoft wields as a monopoly that something this horrible and poorly designed is the most popular word processor.
However, despite my superlative rhetoric, I consider Lotus Notes even worse.
It's already happened. My wife was collaborating with someone on a Powerpoint presentation for a class. When she got the PowerPoint file, PowerPoint gave some utterly cryptic message about the registry when trying to open it. To make a long story short, and no thanks to Microsoft, I found out it was a PowerPoint 95 file, which Microsoft no longer supports, and as is typical of their utter laziness and contempt for users their piece of crap software doesn't tell you this, but rather gives you a completely meaningless error message, leading you to believe the file might be corrupt (it wasn't), or the software was messed up (it wasn't, at least according to Microsoft's abysmal standards of "correct").
It turns out I had to find an archived version of the PowerPoint 97 viewer in order to let my wife load the file. So Microsoft already doesn't support their own formats, and this is using their software, paid for. With this level of complete incompetence and disdain for customers, naturally they want a subscription model. They haven't done anything to Office in more than 10 years that 95% of their users want or need, so how else are they going to keep making money while shovelling out the same half-working barely-usable garbageware. And don't get me started on Word which is definitely the second, and maybe the third or more most compatible software for its own format.
Similar thing with Windows XP. It worked. Its worst deficiencies had all been corrected or at least improved. There was no possible way Vista could complete with a product that people were happy with, so they shoved out Vista while it was still half-baked and then will simply hit everyone up for another upgrade when Vista is finally finished (er, Windows 7). Microsoft simply cannot make money any more by providing good products and adding improvements and new features over time, so they need some other way to extort the cash they couldn't earn in a truly free market.
Another sidenote: Because of government subsidies, in the year 2000 almost all Swedes below the age of 65 had a computer at home. Unfortunatly, I don't think that it is the case anymore, but all Swedes still have gratis acces to computers through public libraries. It's good to be part of the developed part of the world.
In the U.S.A., computers are cheap enough that almost anyone with even a little motivation can have them. Plus all Americans have free access to computers through public libraries. Plus, the government didn't waste billions of dollars giving free computers to a bunch of people that would never use them. Just because our government doesn't provide a womb-like existence to us doesn't mean we aren't developed. Sweden does some things better than the U.S.. The U.S. does some things better than Sweden. I think you should check your elitist attitude at the login prompt.
I certainly agree that Windows isn't Intelligently Designed, but does it count as Evolution if it gets worse over time?
I think Windows is a case of "Just Happened".
Well, I _was_ joking. The difference is that so many of the problems of Windows have nothing to do with technical difficulties, bugs that naturally occur in any complex software, etc, and more to do with the sheer arrogance of Microsoft, its unwillingness to do things it should do and the utter contempt it has for its customers.
No software is perfect but when Microsoft's biggest competitor is its old products, and it's been reduced to sabotaging its old products (by, say, refusing to sell them when they are still highly in demand), they have reached a point where more effort, by far, is being put into maintaining their monopoly, and thus their cashflow, by means _other_ than trying to sell good products, outperform the competition or engage in anything resembling free market behavior. Microsoft doesn't compete (if they ever did) because they can't compete. They can only strongarm, cheat and generally be bullies and thugs. That's all they know how to do.
If this were a fair fight, I'd cut MS some slack, because they do some things well, or at least used to. But they cheat. They lie. The steal. They extort. They are just a big evil corporation that, in my opinion, causes far more harm to the industry than the good they may have once produced and is stifling innovation and just generally making life worse. There's a difference between playing hardball to win in business and generally being a spoiler and a complete boat anchor to the cause of technology.
Once upon a time, things were better for users because Microsoft existed. Bill Gates had a dream of having a PC on every desktop. That dream was achieved, but Microsoft no longer contributes to the state of the art. Now they harm it. They do just do everything they can to sell more software than the other guy. They do everything they can to lock customers into their software prison. They do everything they can to keep the other guy from selling software. They do everything they can so no one can compete with them.
Given all that, I have a hard time being critical of anyone who isn't Microsoft, even if I should be.
When Ubuntu is competing against an OS which has been a vector for millions of computers to be compromised over the last 10+ years and has caused untold billions of dollars of damage and wasted billions of hours of people's time, I think it's not a bad track record.
A Circuit City just opened in our town (yes, as amazing as that sounds) and I went in there once or twice and the sheer waste of floor space is amazing. I can see how they went out out of business... they don't bother to carry any stock except the most basic items. They used to have a decent music and movie selection, and now you're lucky if the product on the shelf is even sorted.
Well, clearly there is no "vision" at places like Microsoft where the OS takes longer to boot that it did 10 years ago and the same app takes as long to start up as it did 20 years ago.
Frankly, if you told me 20 years ago that computers would in the late 2000s take 1-2 minutes to boot (for the short time I used Vista on a very capable machine it took 7 minutes to boot after a single OS update), and that Word takes between 30-60 seconds just to load or that Outlook freezes for 15-30 seconds every time I unminimize it or click on a folder, I would have told you you were crazy.
(Of course, I also would have expected to see fully-blown natural language processing, voice recognition and Duke Nukem Forever...)
Despite all the advances in speed and capability, our computers today are doing many of the same tasks no faster, and even more slowly than they did when they ran at 100th the speed with 1000th the memory and 10000th as much disk space.
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems.
That's a great start. The problem is that Microsoft will simply subvert the standards process to its own ends and become the de facto standard. They've done it before.
Microsoft only likes standards when it can define the standard.
Other than that, I would highly support the concept.
I think they do understand that. However, they also understand that "good enough" is better than "nothing", which makes me wonder why you are complaining.
I've always adhered to the maxim to never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, but in recent years, I've come strongly to believe that that no longer works for Microsoft.
You know this could all be done without burdening the user with two of the most annoying and crappy pieces of software technologies on the planet, ActiveX and Java. But that assumes the people involved don't hold their users in utter contempt.
Why does everything from Microsoft turn into a kick in the nuts to the user?
The irony of the Beatles' music was that while so much of it sounded simple, it was much more complex that it seemed. In fact, I've found it's an incredible and rare talent to make complex music, but it's even more incredible and rare to make complex music that doesn't sound complex. It works on more levels for more people, and I think that's one of the reasons why people (including me) revere the music of the Beatles as much as they do:
They broadened the boundaries of "pop" music incredibly, helping to lay much of the groundwork for music of the next decade, and at the same time were sowing the seeds for the "art rock" progressive music movement that also thrived in the 70s.
Plus they had neat haircuts.
Also, strangely enough, I can't find a single person above 15 who likes 2000's music. Why is that?
If you're referring to popular music, no question: It sucks.
However, as someone who is 43, if I were to rate my Top N favorite albums of all time, probably 40% of them would be from the 2000s... but not anything you'd ever hear on the radio (except maybe occasionally on some odd channels on satellite). There's just as much "good" music being made as there always was, if not more, but the media hegemony has almost completely walled it off from the traditional outlets (radio, etc).
Despite my broad interests in music (rock, progressive, blues, jazz, electronic), the only radio that I care to listen to is talk, classical and the occasional program on public radio.
I've heard that average radio station has a playlist of some 400 songs. My Neuros II has about 13000 songs (all legally acquired, mind you). What would _you_ choose?
It was on the edge of my tongue but I couldn't place the context until you finished the line. On one hand, I'm disappointed I didn't get the exact reference right away. On the other hand, it would have bugged me all day.
Thanks.
p.s. I've been listening to digital Beatles for 20 years. Dunno what all the fuss is about... now.
Well, now that I think of it, it's kind of like Windows. The basic OS is OK, but all the utilities are really crappy. However, there are plenty of third-party utilities that solve the glaring problems.
Still, it would be nice if Microsoft, with their tens of thousands of employees, tens of billions of dollars and tens of IQ points worth of management could come up with something better than "pathetic" for these basic utilities. After paying all that money it would be nice not to have to pay more just to get basic useful functionality.
Of course, I stick with free software these days. It's not always perfect, but it's much more flexible, usually better, and it's not made by people who have nothing but contempt for me.
I'll agree with you there. I have a Pocket PC that runs WinCE 2002 and it was a total joke. Pocket Word was worse than useless because it would totally lock up opening anything bigger than a tiny document and was absurdly slow when it actually did work. "Closing" a program would actually "minimize" it and switching between open apps meant either launching it again or no fewer than 7 stylus clicks to switch among the open apps. It was like all the bad ideas from the PDA world and none of the good features of the Windows world. Well, at least the thing booted in about 3 seconds.
Still with the Gower reader, a copy of Age of Empires (despite it's totally impotent AI), PocketUFO and that weird Korean WinAmp clone, I've gotten plenty of value out of the thing.
If I had to pick the worst software I've ever used it would be Lotus Notes and a close second would be Microsoft Word. The best would have to be (among many things, 4NT, MS Visual Studio 6, Windows 2000 (if you don't count Explorer) and Firefox).
I like to run amor for the same reason. I get the clever antics and it doesn't ruin anything by trying to help me.
Look at the About box in IE... they give credit to NCSA among others because, ta da, IE was derived from stuff they did. Netscape paved the way until it collapsed under its own bloat and IE became the browser of choice, and then proceeded to stagnate for the better part of a decade. Then came Firefox and Opera and Microsoft was once again forced to play catch-up.
Let's face it, "catch up" is the only thing Microsoft has ever done.
It's not the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft, that would be keeping Steve Ballmer in charge indefinitely.
However, they lose leverage when significant portions of the population aren't using their browser. Remember, they can only compete through unfair means, they are too stagnant, too bloated and too atrophied to actually produce software that isn't years behind everyone else... all they can do is lie, cheat and steal marketshare. However, they are very good at that and have the resources, the willpower and the chutzpah to keep doing that for many years. Who's going to stop them? The Department of Justice? They are in MS's pocket as much as anyone.
Microsoft will hobble along for many more years, if not decades, before they become completely irrelevant as a business, but in terms of the state of the art, they haven't been relevant for years. Their only technological success these days is wholly based on their formerly good products that have been unnecessarily "upgraded" into the hopeless, obsolete mess they remain today, but are still shipped on 99% of computers sold, because, hey, they can force it.
If I were in charge, I would dump Vista and everything that reeks of the stink of it and go back to XP SP3 and start over. Take a product people actually like and want to use and move on, rather than trying to triage a product that almost no one wants and doesn't offer anything over XP. But that's me. I've used almost every Microsoft OS going back to DOS 1.1, and while a few upgrades were painful (DOS 3.0, Windows 95, NT 4.0 SP2 come to mind), they were generally really good (even when I wasn't expecting it) until Vista. That was the one that pushed me to Linux full time, and I haven't looked back.
Well, I'm not entirely optimistic yet. Sure, Microsoft is losing on features, quality and security... no duh. They are beyond the point where they can actually put out a decent product that doesn't all but collapse under its own corpulence. On the other hand, Microsoft didn't become the biggest and most powerful software company based on features, quality and security.
Sooner or later they are going to start fighting back (and I don't mean that feeble, half-hearted IE8), and they never fight clean.
Although it does sound a bit anti-Microsoft on Google's part
So what. You don't think Microsoft wouldn't shiv them in the back every chance they get. They've only been doing it for 30 years and deserve much more than this little taste of their own medicine.
And no, I don't consider this "being evil".
Not only does Microsoft richly deserve this (i.e., real competition), but it's a service to users by helping to improve the Internet ecology as a whole, as the millions of users that are most likely to be pwned over are now being directly told to switch to software that isn't hopelessly insecure. If some people pay the price for allowing themselves to be locked in to the prison that is Microsoft software, well, hopefully they'll learn their lesson.
"Works with IE" is perfectly OK, "Requires IE" is stupid and evil.
Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction.
You're right we're offended... because that's a stupid and ignorant claim.
To wit: My first experience with IE7
Wait. 30 millibits?! I can store more than that on my fingers!