Skip to main content

Trolls and Fanboys

I was poring over Slashdot today (as nerds are want to do when they procrastinate),
where I found an interesting article about Microsoft working with Mozilla to make firefox work better with Windows Vista.

In between all the usual rantings and zealotry, there was an interesting idea raised -

"Are Microsoft planning to ship Firefox with Vista?"

Initially, I just Auto-Snorted and read on... But then later I came back to think about it...


You know, if Microsoft (MSFT) is really serious about being seen as a company that's about innovation - one that is about embracing great ideas, this would be the perfect way to leave all those crazy slashdotters gaping slackjawed in their tracks. To regain a bit of the market trust that they lost. To get people to like the company more - maybe the way they feel about other giant companies...

All that anti-trust stuff, lock-in and lock down stuff would just be blown away if they would include, on equal footing, the open-source browser as an option to users of Vista. It's not anti-competitive. No competitor could possibly gain from it (the mozilla foundation is a not-for-profit organisation) and it couldn't possibly harm any user, who was free to choose which browser they liked best. And what a great way to prove that you support web standards, instead of trying to mangle them for your own advantage...

Oh, and it could make the lives of web-developers the world over so much easier. Like this guy.

So, you know, maybe it's not such a crazy idea after all. Come on then Microsoft, lets see you step up and prove it to us once and for all that you really do support innovation, and you're not just trying to lock us all into Internet Explorer - ship Firefox with Vista.

Hey, It might happen...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide) TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it. In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on. ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernat...
2 comments
Read more

Still Crazy

When I started with TOWER Software four years ago, I was keen to get on with the job. You know, new project manager guy and all, trying to figure out what was what, and who was who. As part of this breaking-in process, I went around and asked each developer what they were working on, and how long they estimated that their current project would take. I'll admit that I had a secret agenda - it's important to find out who are the overly optimistic guys, and who are the more seasoned realists, because you're supposed to adjust your project schedules accordingly.. Anyway, I collected all this data and feed it into a secret Gantt chart I had somewhere. Most of the team were working on features that were being shipped in the next few months, and I got the broad range of overly positive responses, which is pretty common. I know I'm a terribly optimistic estimator. (Incidentally, if you're like me, my advice is to always multiply your estimate by the value of pi in order to ...
2 comments
Read more

The height of Retro cool?

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...
2 comments
Read more