After months waiting for Microsoft to give me a reason to remain loyal, I finally dumped Internet Explorer for the Firefox Web browser last week.
At the office, my cubicle colleague -- a Firefox aficionado of long standing -- smugly greeted the news by asking me what took so long. But rest assured this is no small concession.
The short answer is I don't have a lot of time or patience to fiddle around getting my different applications to play nice. So when forced to decide between competing software alternatives, yours truly has nearly always gone with the Microsoft offering. For most Internet surfers, it's as if the calendar stopped in 1999.
Okay, I'm a wimp who takes the path of least resistance. I'm also less interested in creating the ultimate computing experience known to mankind than in making sure things work the way they should. That's the upside of sticking with a convicted predatory monopolist: You can assume a high degree of uniformity and application integration.
But after being tossed the gauntlet, I finally loaded Firefox at home. To my surprise, the product won me over in short order. I love its pop-up blocker, as well as the ease with which it accesses Really Simple Syndication feeds. I didn't use a stopwatch, but it loads fast and opens Web pages without a hitch.
I can't say the same about Internet Explorer (though Microsoft recently introduced a similar pop-up-blocking feature). Putting your finger on the reasons for the slow response is worthy of a Harvard Business study. In the meantime, it's useful to recall that Microsoft wasn't always so lethargic when it came to juicing up its Web browser technology.
Microsoft was a latecomer to the browser market and scrambled to catch up. Early on, the company stumbled and the first couple of attempts at a Web browser weren't any good. But this was a make-or-break proposition; Microsoft couldn't afford to let Netscape's Web browser displace Windows as the primary interface sitting on the computer between application developers and users.
By the third try, Internet Explorer had pulled even and later became the better Web-browsing application. The rest is history. Unfortunately for Web surfers, it's as if the calendar stopped in 1999.
Actually, that last statement is not fully accurate. There is one major change you can ascribe to Internet Explorer: The PC browser world is in much worse shape. Because management took so long to tackle Internet Explorer's security woes, Microsoft allowed virus writers to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser and wreak untold havoc on unsuspecting computer users.
Talkback
"Fixing the myriad holes in Windows and Internet Explorer is no small job. But why should that prevent Microsoft from offering sensible improvements to the browser, such as the inclusion of dynamically updated content from RSS feeds a la Firefox?"
The problem isn't the size/cost of the job, but the perverse incentives of Microsoft's current business model. A legacy of Microsoft's battle with IBM in general, and OS/2 in particular in the early 1990's is a business model that commits to providing free "support" and updates to everyone for as long as the product/version is supported at all. The only way they make money is by selling new versions. Investments in improvements not only don't make Microsoft any money, they reduce future profit potential because the more satisfied customers are with the current version, the harder it will be to persuade them to upgrade.
One way or another, this inability profit from upgrades is likely to cost Microsoft dearly at some point in the not too distant future. The transition from unlimited free updates to paid updates after some warranty period is going unpopular to say the least, particularly since many of the updates are going to be for (security) problems that most user's feel, with reason, shouldn't have been there in the first place. From Microsoft's perspective, the alternatives are even worse.
The obvious choice would be for user's to abandon Windows altogether. More likely in my opinion it that they simply give up on Microsoft updates. Abandon Windows/Office in favor of non-Microsoft alternative as far as seems practical and continue using it only for those functions for which no reasonable alternative exists and which can be locked behind enough layers of (non Microsoft) security that the security vulnerabilities cease to be an issue. While they would continue relying, to some extent, on Microsoft software for the indefinite future, they wouldn't be buying anything more from Microsoft. Updates and new versions would be viewed as not only unnecessary, but undesirable because their behavior and vulnerabilities wouldn't be as well understood and predictable as the old version.
I did that too, some years ago.
Next, change to linux, you will not regret that either.
Just start with a multiboot and perhaps Mandrake or SUSE
or, or, or, until you feel "at /home".
Regards,