Internet Explorer a mistake

John C. Dvorak makes an interesting point in his PC Mag column about Internet Explorer being Microsoft's biggest mistake. In John's view, Internet Explorer distracts Microsoft from concentrating on their operating and office products, creates most of their antitrust problems and compounds security problems in Windows. He suggests they should ditch Internet Explorer and do a deal with Mozilla.

He's quite right about the security flaws. Take Internet Explorer out of Windows and you have a much more stable and secure system. However I think John overlooks why IE was developed in the way it was.

In 1995, Microsoft had been caught napping by the Internet and Netscape appeared to be a real risk. So MS had to bury Netscape, the quickest way was to integrate IE into Windows giving functions that Netscape could never do. It worked.

As John points out, the cost of that was years of litigation and massive security problems for Windows users. But IE did achieve it's task. It's notable that since Netscape's effective demise that there was barely any development in Internet Explorer until Mozilla and Opera started gaining traction.

Microsoft strike me as a company in trouble. Even the biggest companies have trouble juggling too many balls at the same time. I agree with John: It's time for MS to drop Internet Explorer and concentrate on their OS and Office products.

Windows becomes Nagware

Microsoft today released an update to their Windows Genuine Activation Notification program. Instead of making this mandatory for users wanting to install MS updates and add-ins it will now nag any users it suspects are using a non-licensed copy.

I'm ambivalent about this. The people most affected by this are those buying or selling systems with pirated copies of XP, the more done to put these people out of business, the better. On the other hand, I am certain we'll see some people driven mad by this system when it falsely detects them as using a pirate copy.

A slightly irritating point with this is how MS released this update out of sequence with their usual "Update Tuesday". I guess anti-piracy is a higher priority than the security of user's systems.

Synchronising files

One of the banes of our lives is synching files. We have a number of customers who have really suffered with this and it's a problem we have to struggle with. Now we're having a play with Microsoft's Power Toys and the Synch Tool.

In general, we've had good experiences with the various power toys, particularly Tweak UI. So it will be interesting to see how the Synch Tool behaves. The hope is that it's a lot more reliable than Microsoft's Briefcase or Laplink.