Microsoft got serious about the browser when they saw the killing Netscape was making with its browser. Once they ran the business part of Netscape into the ground, during the Browser War 1 (BW1), they got incredibly lazy and thought that embedding IE into the OS and other applications would be the panicea for increasing user content and happiness...

Move the clock forward a few years and enter Firefox with a completely open source/revamped of the old netscape product, that's much more secure and less bloated than IE and now they (Microsoft) get serious about browsers again.

Steve, instead a bunch of really flashy crap, how about a product that isn't as vulnerable as what you already have on the table?

If I were a Mac user, I would laugh at the notion of pollution my iMac with any piece/part of IE. Period.

And with the small increases in market share that *nix is making, day by day, he should get down on his hands and knees and thank what ever "God" (presumably the $$$) he prays to, that most people aren't more home/less technically inclined users about *nix.

I chose Paris because even she has the sense to see through his bs

Do Super Steve/Billy Boy Gates and the Wizard of Oz take us all for idiots.

With the same Sub-Primates at the helm, do they honestly think that the Course they have steered/the furrows they have ploughed and planted will be changed to provide something different.

They're 'avin a larf, poor dears that they are, but will someone nice do them a big favour and advise them that the laugh is on them whenever the emperor has no clothes and is Microsoft.

And I didn't chose Paris, intentionally and on purpose, because she wouldn't be at all interested in anything Microsoft. And the Jolly Roger was chosen, not only in honour of a Passionate Paris but also because IT sends the right Semantic message ..... Prepare for boarding, me young buckaroos. USOS* are Cracked Pipes of Proprietary Phished Information Hoovered up from Trafficked Information Picked up be Advanced MetaDataAnalysis ....Snoop Algorithms.

And that makes them Catastrophically Vulnerable to SMART MisDIrectAXXXXIOn.

* Uncle Sam Operating Systems

And the enigmatic Title, by the way, is rhetorical, and is AIMisDirectAXXXXIOn? :-). ......... or a Help Is Virtual AIdDevelopment.

If he doesn't think it's worth bringing yet another browser to the Mac, why bring yet another browser to Windows when there are already so many good ones?

"Admitting to mistakes and lessons learned, Ballmer said it was important to incubate new ideas separately before implementing them and integrating Windows and IE."

/me thinks if they'd learned their lesson they would not only incubate the ideas separately, but incubate the browser and OS completely separately. (And there i thought microsoft actually tried to make vista more secure, but apparently they didn't care enough to rip an "inevitably" insecure app like a browser out of the OS core)

Now then, if MS's plan is to not have "two of everything", how will the unified services be branded? Will it be "Microsoft users, come over to Yahoo!", or "Yahoo! users, come over to Microsoft?"

Well, if they do the latter, what exactly have they bought from Yahoo!?

The reason the open-source browsers are doing so well is because they innovate based on user's needs; for browsers these are the four S'es.. Security, Stability, Standards, Simplicity.

M$ innovation in IE has tended to be about catching-up with the others, gaining and holding market share and enforcing lock-in.. shareholders may want/need these things but not end users.

M$'s problem here is that they are not competing against different products but against a different mindset. A mindset that in this case produces a superior result.

Uncle Fester says: "When all's said and done, a bunch of those PHP applications will be running at high scale and in production for a long time to come."

Oh yes, come on, don't make me laugh! Let's see how quickly they can replace all the PHP scripts with .NET and Silverlight. Because that's what this takeover is all about in the first place, pushing Silverlight down people's throats, wether they like it or not.

Silent Steve knows it, the 'pull' days for Microsoft are long gone, what's left is 'push', 'push', 'push'.

I'd really like to have an icon with Steve doing the 'monkey boy' dance. Would have been appropriate here.

I think that the most sensible approach is to not change a thing.

they may consolidate a few things, but in all honest I doubt they are going to re-brand the Yahoo! portal to look the same as the MSN portal (AKA get rid of yahoo), for a start those who want to use the MSN portal already do, those who want to use the Yahoo portal do so probably because they don't want to use the MSN portal.

I assume they'll attempt to keep customer loyalty by not changing branding at all.

they aren't going to say to every Yahoo! Mail user that they've not got a hotmail/MSN address and that they can no longer sign in from the same place.

However I imagine that behind the scenes they may consolidate.

I.E they can have single mail server farms for both Yahoo and Hotmail, reducing server costs, a single portal backend that just serves content to two different web farms for front end.

a single search engine database that serves data to two distinct web front pages.

in all it's mostly about getting ad revenue from MSN pages and getting add revenue from Yahoo! pages.

they aren't going to take away Yahoo pages because upsetting peoples habbits are going to make them look elsewhere, not necessarily to MS.

the simplest way to look at it is like this

ad display shares (and thus ad revenue) is split (I'm making the figures up for simplicity

35% Google

25% MSN

20% Yahoo

20% Other (dogpile, ask, hotbot etc).

with microsoft and yahoo combined it'll look like this

45% Microhoo!

35% Google

20% Other

the take over isn't about rebranding apps and changing logos and portal pages, it's about getting a greater foothold in the money making areas of the web -adverts.

if microsoft can display twice as many adverts as they once were then they are now claiming twice as much ad revenue.

Also they will be seen as the biggest add provider, thus more people will want to advertise with them knowing that their ads would be displayed to more people.

Yes, perhaps in the future MS might use some of that money to push silverlight apps and such into google applications like web chat/mail etc... but at the moment there is no rhyme or reason to be doing this.

Whatever happened to companies working hard to create a dominant market position by being the best and then working hard to stay in that domination by still being the best. Even if you have no competition in a market the only logical thing to do is to work your damnedest to ensure that that's because the competition could never compete with you on the things that matter.

If Microsoft, or any other company for that matter, actually looked at things from a consumer-centric rather than a competitor-centric (or, less charitably, profit-centric) point of view then they would be immeasurably better off both in terms of profits and in terms of public perception. If you ask 'what do you want?' and then *gasp* actually do it then the people love you. If you ask the equivalent of 'which of these three crap options would you least hate?' then people really resent you because a) you're doing what you want not what the people want and b) you're trying to make it look the other way round.

I'm not a fanboy of any flavour. I'm a 'best tool for the job' kinda guy. I use windows where appropriate, *n*x where appropriate and I have an iPod running Rockbox. And a PS2. And a Wii. And a DS. And a PSP. And a Dreamcast. And...

(OK, you got me...I only ever buy Nokias. My guilty fanboy secret. But don't tell anyone, OK?)

The technology used by web services isn't important, so long as it is stable, secure, scalable and easy to maintain.

PHP meets these standards, so why would Microsoft rework entire sites just to change them to their own languages?

Microsoft doesn't use exclusively its own software for internal purposes. They use Perforce and not SourceSafe and they've been known to use Macromedia products for Online help (HTML based).

What's the big deal with having everything in ASP.NET etc when it comes to the web?

"the take over isn't about rebranding apps and changing logos and portal pages, it's about getting a greater foothold in the money making areas of the web -adverts.

if microsoft can display twice as many adverts as they once were then they are now claiming twice as much ad revenue."

Actually, there's another place where there is money to be made: "de-advertising" the Internet.

Imagine a broadband connection that, instead of promising unrealistic speeds and failing to deliver, promised you two megabits and actually gave you two megabits a second! Now imagine a transparent web proxy server that simply swallowed advertisements, 1x1 GIFs and those __utma/utmb/utmc/utmz cookies. Imagine all logging straight to /dev/null.

People would pay for that, I'm sure.

"Microsoft would apply its innovation energy to things other than bringing yet another browser to Apple's platform"

Makes sense, when you consider that if innovation energy was electricity, Microsoft wouldn't even be capable of charging up an iPod shuffle.

"How about a little commercial integrity around here?" ... By Andy

Posted Friday 7th March 2008 11:25 GMT

Now you're whistlin' Dixie, Andy. ...... The Relentless Pursuit of XXXXCellents 42 Love.

AIMagic Key to Beta Codes in CodeXXXX.

And Yes, this Program also has more than a little to do with an independent, European manned-spaceflight capability; and I for one would like to see it ..... Virtually for Real. ..... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7285796.stm

A.N.Other Paralleling Dimension which although IT may be Virtualised is more than just Real because of IT ........... Giving AI a QuITE Alien Perception.

However,..... fortuitously, is the Perception Flexible to Adjust to Requirements ........ AI SMART Quantum OS with TEMPEST Control.

A little something for NSA/Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Dr. Donald Kerr, to BetaTest/Inve$t in. :-)

Non-State Actors Virtualising the Great Game and ITs Greatest of Games ..... Love in DirectAXXXXIOn?

And any doubts on any of that would be entirely yours to ponder for no good reason.

"Once they ran the business part of Netscape into the ground, during the Browser War 1 (BW1), they got incredibly lazy and thought that embedding IE into the OS and other applications would be the panicea for increasing user content and happiness..."

Ummm, no. They, MS, got incredibly scared when it looked like they were going to be hauled over the coals for monopolistic abuses. They were scared they'd be prohibited from including IE with Windows, 'cause then what other weapon would they have for killing Netscape?

So they took core chunks of IE, and shoved them down deep, deep into Windows. Then, still in mad panic mode, tied many separate pieces of Windows to the deeply buried IE chunks, leading to double plus good things like the common tasks panel in Windows Explorer, the Extended tab in the services manager, Active Desktop, and more. All so they could say, "Look judge! It's not a separate product, but an integral part of the OS that also just happens to do web browsing, so we could never, ever sell Windows without IE."