Microsoft — Page 5

The headline says it all

January 12, 2002 by Michael Boyle

The headline says it all

: Judge Spikes Microsoft Private Suit Settlement.

today when the story broke that MSN.com shuts out non-Microsoft browsers. Their stated reason? “‘For browsers that we know don’t support those standards or that we can’t insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the’ standards.”

It seems that they’re just pushing the browser upgrade campaign, as suggested by the nice folks at the Web Standards Project.

Well it might seem like that’s what this is about. But it’s not. They’ve clearly taken on similar tactics – but wrapping themselves up in W3C standards? It’s BS. Utter bullshit.

Fact is, for all their hemming and hawing about web standards, MSN works fine in Netscape 6.1 for OS X, Omniweb, and even Netscape 4.7x (well, it displays, if only minimally). No, this isn’t about web standards. This is obviously about trying to get people to upgrade to a particular standards-compliant browser.

I’m not surprised or angry with MS though. I expect this sort of behaviour from them. But to pervert the work of people legitimately trying to support and encourage web standards? Bullshit.

There’s this long article

August 31, 2001 by Michael Boyle

over at News.com today called HailStorm promise and threat remain distant. Don’t bother to read it though. The quick summary is, “OK, we at MS don’t know our business model for all this stuff, so let’s just lock everyone in to our world… the money’s sure to come from somewhere, someday.” Followed by a sly wink, of course. Anyone who believes that Microsoft doesn’t know exactly how they’re going to get lots of money from every conceivable source from this whole thing hasn’t been following along.

I’m not a huge

July 19, 2001 by Michael Boyle

tea-leaf reader when it comes down to predicting/analyzing Microsoft’s moves, but it strikes me that their recent announcements are doing two things: one, they’re catalyzing the “anti-MS” developer communities to the extent that maybe, just maybe, real alternatives will result, real interop up and down the business. Two, though, they’re very brashly going for lock-in like never before, seemingly trying to make the world in their own image.

Of course those two propositions are related. But it’s interesting that by (arguably) going further even than they were found guilty of last year, they may be helping to sow the seeds for that decision to be blown away – with the introduction of real competition. Or at least not to be the cause of complaint in the future.

I’m sure it has been

July 11, 2001 by Michael Boyle

blogged a million times, but nonetheless the news from Redmond that manufacturers can choose to remove Microsoft products from their shipping boxes is very interesting. Only trouble is that MS has trained me very well to wait for the other shoe to drop – to hear that there’s some other “feature” that will make today’s announcement more or less moot.