Naive about IE? Give me a break.
"I've never understood how Microsoft has profited from IE's dominance."
Charles says:
"This is a very naive view. There is a certain base level of standards compliance that all browsers implement. Beyond that, Microsoft has added siginificant functional enhancements to IE which allow it to do much more than browers such as Netscape or Firefox." He goes on to say it has more to do with intranets than the Internet.
Either way, I have to respectfully say that he's full of crap. That sounds like a quote from the MS PR handbook.
Anyone using Firefox right now that is missing out due to the lack of "significant functional enhancements" in IE? Anyone?
*crickets chirp*
That's about what I figured. Yeah, I'm sure you can find some exceptions, but give me a break. Heck, even in Corporate America I see no IE-dependence. In fact, I get mini-throw-up every time I start a new gig and find that a company is still hanging on to Lotus Notes databases, Domino Web servers and such.
I'm as much of a Microsoft cheerleader than anyone. MS products have changed my life and I wrote a book about them. But I haven't seen anyone give any compelling evidence that IE allowed them to earn actual money. Yeah, they killed Netscape by pushing out IE, but so what? Netscape was a company with the most riciulous business plan ever conceived (if there really was one at all), and the product sucked and got worse every release. The hardcore Internet dorks like me started with Netscape, and eventually moved to IE because Navigator sucked.
That's what kills me about the last six or seven years about this saga. There are really two issues that everyone intermingles into this demonization of Microsoft. The first is that Microsoft used its monopoly to squash competition. Seriously, what competition did Netscape offer? I'm not saying it's right, but to suggest that Netscape was ever going to be a bona fide profitable business is a fantasy.
The second issue is that proprietary IE features would cause Microsoft to own the Web. (Ironically, it should be noted that Netscape's early versions had "extensions" to HTML that did the very same thing.) Yet here we are talking about the relative explosion in market share by Firefox. Huh. A lot of good that desktop monopoly did Microsoft, eh?