Warranted Genuine Snarks
I've been reading about this, and I'm worried. Bluntly, This Cannot Possibly Be Right. There is just no good reason at all to engage in some kind of holding-pattern when you've got, what, an 85% market share? 90%, and the world nipping at your heels? Not when it would take so little, like a point-five release and a bugfix or two, to anchor down that market share until the Next Big Release.
A company like Microsoft would not just give up the Web. There has to be more going on.
Mike Hoye -- Sun Jun 15 01:06:27 2003
Well, they don't make money off of IE, do they? (Honest question, I don't know anything about the tech business.)
IE 5 for the Mac was indeed a nice piece of software for its time. Mozilla quickly won me over, though, with tabbed browsing and various other widgets.
Pam (http://home.uchicago.edu/~kor2) -- Sun Jun 15 02:12:45 2003
As I understand it, the problem for Microsoft was and still is the resulting obsolescence of the "operating system" concept.
Microsoft is a company held up by two pillars - the Windows and Office. With Java being runnable in a browser, who the hell cares about an operating system? I can just browse to the various applications that I need, and given that they're completely device-independent via Java, the OS is just a waldo that divorces the browser/VM from IO and memory management.
There it is - that's what this has to be about. Microsoft, therefore, has to provide a browser that both leverages their market share and protects half of their business from obsolescence. And in this case, with a buggy/broken browser occupying an overwhelming market share, they can do just that. They prevent possible replacement technologies from working on their platform, and get time to make their own that will.
This is not an abication - this is a stall tactic.
Mike Hoye -- Mon Jun 16 00:01:59 2003