Proving yet again that my opinion of
John C. Dvorak is
bipolar at best, I must say that I kind of agree with his most recent column, in which he posits that
nothing qualifies more as Microsoft's greatest blunder than
Internet Explorer. Browser wars aside, the web browser from Redmond is the source of a great many of Microsoft's
problems. "All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from
Internet Explorer," Dvorak says. "If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for
IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions." Dvorak suggests
that Microsoft's ongoing obsession with the browser is bad business and that it should yank Internet Explorer out of OS
and immediately cease development. "People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser.
Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need
be," he says, going on to note what we all know to be true: it'll never happen, and Microsoft "will forever
be plagued by its greatest blunder ever."
Tags: ie, internetexplorer, microsoft, windows
