Lazycoder

IE and the Microsoft API

Scoble – the IE team cares
Joel on Software – the Microsoft API is lost

And, I know quite a few of the people on the IE team. They are not happy at all that I’m using Firefox. Whenever I have lunch or a meeting with someone on the IE team they ask me “how can we get you back?”

Is that the sentiment of people who don’t care about what they are doing?

I’m sure the IE team cares, they know what needs to be done. It’s OBVIOUS what needs to be done. It’s right there in Firefox and Opera. The COMPANY doesn’t care because it’s not in the companies best interest anymore. It IS in the companies best interest to let IE die off slowly and quietly to draw people (developers and users) back to the desktop. That’s why all your posts about “Microsoft doesn’t want to kill off the web” ring hollow with me because it doesn’t make business sense. IE is behind the curve technologically and it will cost lots of money to bring it up to speed for very little benefit. The web is something that Microsoft can’t control anymore, the desktop they CAN control. It makes sense for Microsoft to focus on the desktop.

Joel Spolsky wrote something along the same lines in his latest post.

It’s not that Microsoft didn’t notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better that it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that “Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft’s stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We’re investing on the desktop, we think it’s a good place to be, and we hope we’re going to start a wave of excitement…”

In Joel’s mind though

The trouble is: it’s too late.

I completely agree, FireFox continues to outstrip IE in every aspect except acceptance. That’s coming quickly. The last update to Internet Exporer was in Sept. of 2002. Since then the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox project has come into being and been updated 11 times. Heck even Netscape has been updated more recently than IE. It will take a LOT of work to change the momentum the big Titanic called Microsoft. I think they should just stop with the pretense and let FireFox take over the browser space completely. I’ve said so before.