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addersljMany of you know that, at home, I'm a keen Mac user. Part of this is an aesthetic decision: I like the industrial design of Apple machine far more than the beige boxes prevalent in the Windows world or, far worse, the horrible attempts some of the manufacturers have made to produce "trendy" computers. Let's not even talk about Dell's black bricks, either. I also find Mac OS X to be a more conducive and productive working environment than any flavour of Windows.
However, there's also a philosophical element to my decision, in that I'm adamant that one company should not be allowed to completely dominate something as important to modern life as computers and the internet. This article does a rather good job of explaining what the significance of the announcement that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, and the IE version won't be upgraded until Longhorn, the next version of Windows, ships. Oh, and it'll be built into the OS, so forget getting it stand alone for Windows XP or earlier.
Essentially, they've won the browser wars, got away with monopolistic behaviour in the US courts, and now they're stifling internet innovation until they can make a buck out of it by charging you for a systems upgrade. This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser. That, my friends, is going to be the current version of IE for a few years to come. Welcome to the stifled web.
However, there's also a philosophical element to my decision, in that I'm adamant that one company should not be allowed to completely dominate something as important to modern life as computers and the internet. This article does a rather good job of explaining what the significance of the announcement that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, and the IE version won't be upgraded until Longhorn, the next version of Windows, ships. Oh, and it'll be built into the OS, so forget getting it stand alone for Windows XP or earlier.
Essentially, they've won the browser wars, got away with monopolistic behaviour in the US courts, and now they're stifling internet innovation until they can make a buck out of it by charging you for a systems upgrade. This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser. That, my friends, is going to be the current version of IE for a few years to come. Welcome to the stifled web.
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Date: 2003-06-16 08:29 am (UTC)Which, uh, wasn't in the original post?
It's the essence of what you said was your "core point" and what I understood to be your core point in the first post.
Here's the way I look at it:
The point of the Mac reference was that the non-IE browser market, particularly Mozilla, has far more ability to grow than the Mac market. It's application vs platforms, a far more fluid situation. If your coworkers wanted to use another browser, they could download Mozilla or Opera and use either fairly easily. A Mac requires an investment of money and time to learn that's sufficient to put off anyone without enough motivation.
Not that someone will really download and use another browser without at least some motivation, if only an idle interest. But that's the point. You should see the proportion of older versions of IE and Netscape I see on server logs at work - and the correlation of Windows version to IE version. By and large, people didn't (and many haven't yet) upgrade to IE 6.0 until they upgraded to XP, which had it pre-installed. You'd be surprised how many are still running Win98, for that matter.
Most users don't tend to try all sorts of different browsers, nor do they even bother to upgrade their own browser all that often. Why? Because it takes some tiny bit of effort, and they don't feel any pressing need to do so now - and will only do so later if they think they're missing out on some new thing. This would be true even if Microsoft wasn't dominant - this is just consistent with human nature (witness all the folks still using Netscape 4.x versions). For that matter, it would be an even bigger point with less IE domination.
To try to put it clearly, if some new web standards don't offer anything to users that would motivate them to download another program or even just bother updating their own browser, then they just aren't that big a deal. This isn't Microsoft's doing or fault - for that matter, with the upgraded browser versions for each version of Windows, they've basically been shoving new web standards down the throats of their OS-upgrading customers.
So, I'm not concerned that MS isn't going to upgrade pre-Longhorn IE. If IE 7.0 were released normally, I'd be surprised if the vast majority of IE users would intentionally upgrade before going to Longhorn. Further, if 7.0 supports something new that's actually compelling, being Longhorn-only will become a detriment when Mozilla and others support the same thing. "Gee, do I pay to upgrade to Windows 2003, go through the hassle of installing, and deal with all the new bugs in order to see this neat new thing or just download Mozilla for free?" In fact, that's why I think this policy won't last, but that's beside the point.
I'm going to upgrade and, if need be, adopt new software because I'm interested in some of the new standards. I suspect some will be compelling enough to encourage a lot of people to do the same. But if you're right, and people overall will only go to these standards if Microsoft drags them bodily, then it's just not as bad as you think.