I don’t really understand this problem. Apparently Microsoft wants to rewrite 60% of Vista.
First off. How bad does it have to get within the company that you’re not absolutely petrified of Apple stealing your market share. They need to ship this thing before xmas or just close up shop. By then Apple is going to steal another significant chunk of market share. My bet is that by 2007 Apple will control 15% of the market (assuming no checks by Microsoft)
Second. Their “not invented here syndrome” (NIHS) is just paralyzing them. They need to fix this and now.
For example, if they were to ship IE 7.0 and base it on Firefox they would have this thing out within two weeks. This thing is Open Source and under a BSD license so they can innovate and embrace and extend all they want and on their own terms. The only thing that can explain them not doing this is NIHS.
If they were to base Vista on Linux they’d certainly have the thing done before xmas. Either that or base it off Open Darwin which again is BSD and obviously runs on Intel.
For the last few years I’ve just been ignoring Microsoft (at least when it comes to Windows). They’re just making classic and huge mistakes. If they keep going this way we won’t need to worry about anti-trust issues as they’ll just make themselves irrelevant.
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1
Trackback on Mar 25th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Replace IE7 with Firefox?
Kevin Burton suggests that the Vista delay can be eliminated by tossing IE7 and adopting Firefox. I would be surprised if IE7 is on the Vista critical path, but the idea of Microsoft replacing IE7 made me laugh.
At first, I thought he was kidding, but… -
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Trackback on Mar 25th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Dire times for Microsoft?
Now Im no fan of Microsoft and generally bitch whenever Im forced to use their operating system, but unlike Kevin I dont think the end is neigh for them. They just have too much money.
I dont know how they could need to rew…
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March 24, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Kevin, usually I like you and your points, but shipping IE 7 in two weeks by using Firefox? That shows you have no idea about our customer base and what they expect from us. They expect us not to break their applications. You wanna walk into the CIO’s office at a major company and explain to him why you broke his app?
Oh, and how many languages is Firefox shipping on (and localized for) again? We are shipping on 100.
Does Firefox match the security precautions put into IE 7? No. Not even close.
March 25, 2006 at 2:17 am
“Kevin, usually I like you and your points, but shipping IE 7 in two weeks by using Firefox? That shows you have no idea about our customer base and what they expect from us. They expect us not to break their applications.”
Actually.. that’s the BRILLIANT part about this. It *wouldn’t* break any applications.
It would be a totally new app. If they want to migrate their apps to the new code base thats great.
Now one could argue that people want transparent upgrades but honestly I think people will have about the same amount of trouble with IE7.
“Oh, and how many languages is Firefox shipping on (and localized for) again? We are shipping on 100.”
Yeah…. you can localize to that many too. How long would it take… ? A week if you find the right staff. All you have to do is translate strings.
“Does Firefox match the security precautions put into IE 7? No. Not even close.”
Firefox is OSS. If you want to add additional security precautions you can do that too.
The key point is that with IE 7 you’re duplicating a lot of work that’s already done.
The biggest strength of any software engineer is laziness.
March 25, 2006 at 5:40 am
‘Fraid I have to disagree with you, Kevin. Expecting everyone who writes an application that hosts IE to “migrate their apps” isn’t realisitic, especially given the complexity of hosting the Mozilla Gecko engine. And besides, I *like* have competition among browsers.