On hearing that Google is introducing a browser of its own, I started wondering.
Why does Microsoft care if anyone actually uses Internet Explorer? It’s sold bundled with Microsoft Windows, so Microsoft doesn’t make extra money off of people buying the software. There isn’t a monthly fee for IE. IE doesn’t display, on its own, any advertising. I can’t imagine anyone buying Windows just to get IE.
So why does Microsoft care or even bother supporting/upgrading IE? Why not let
Google and Foxfire take over the market?
Back when it was all HTML, you’d probably be right. But my impression has always been that the money for Microsoft is in the programming languages that make all the shiny stuff happen on fancy-pants web pages. If they can maintain a dominant market share, they can heavily influence what kinds of programming languages thrive by controlling which ones IE will support, leaning however hard they can on people to learn Microsoft programming languages, pay for the books, the software, the courses, and all that.
Not just languages and books, but control of the browsing experience.
Explorer defaults to the MSN search page. As Google has shown, having a dominant search engine is worth a lot of money.
Explorer supports certain types of web-based software better than others. Get someone to build a critical app based on Microsoft technology, and you’ve got more people tied to Windows.
Explorer has certain “extensions” of html. Get people to write webpages that display in Explorer well, and people will become dependent on MS.
My understanding, though I cannot back it up with a cite, is that MS has relationships with advertisers. Advertisers do not want people using browsers like Firefox or Opera, that have built-in, easy-to-use ad blockers.
Ad-blocking is very simple stuff and has been available for years, yet IE has, at least in the past, never included it. If current versions do (I have no idea since I boycott it), it’s only because MS has been forced to offer this, in order to compete with the browsers that do.
In any case, I doubt you’ll every be able to buy a computer with a pre-installed version of IE that has anywhere near the ad-blocking abilities of other browsers. Just my opinion.
MSIE has good ad blockers, too. That’s not the issue.
OTOH, there are still many web applications that only work with MSIE. If people use other browser, Microsoft will be forced to change to accommodate them.
The last time I was forced to use it, about 6 months ago at a client’s office, I searched in vain for any kind of ad-blocking and could not find it. I d/l’d and installed IE-Pro, which helped a little, but still, nowhere near the power and ease of the adblocking in Opera or Firefox…
Consider the pre-web days. Applications running on PCs had to cooperate with Windows, and Microsoft could and did build in special hooks to Windows that their apps could use. Office makes them a lot more money than any programming language.
The reason they crushed Netscape and tried to destroy Java was that these give a vendor independent platform that levels the playing field. If your text processing app runs on a browser, written in Java, there is no way for MS to kill its performance. Even worse, it will run on Linux and on Macs without a rewrite.
Google has been their biggest nightmare. Since most of what Google does is web-based, there has been no way to break the search experience.
During the Microsoft web browser court case monopoly days, it was attributed to Bill Gates himself that the web will only work if everyone has IE as their browser, running on Windows, connected to Microsoft servers with Frontpage as the web tool for managing web sites. Regardless of the accuracy of the statement, Microsoft applications are designed to integrate among themselves, and industry standards be damned. That includes IE.
Wasn’t it Henry Ford who said you can have any color, as long as its black?
IE is part of the digital world’s company town where you owe your soul to them.
If web applications - like Google Docs - are the future of office software (debatable, but not my point) then whoever controls the software used to access those applications is in a position of power. If Google - for example - had the dominant share of the browser market they could easily use it to route more customers towards their software. Controlling the browser market controls the gateway to competing web-based products in other markets.
Having their own Internet software also allows them to do nefarious things with their other business lines. For instance, right around the same time that Microsoft got into the electronic greeting card business, suddenly the name and keywords associated with their biggest competitor in that field made it into Outlook’s auto-updating spam filter list. Oops, your friends can’t receive Blue Mountain greeting cards? Better send them MSN greeting cards instead; those are more reliable.
I’ve heard rumors of them trying similar chicanery with Google search results, though I don’t know how true they are. Still, even the possibility of them doing something like that is good incentive for Google to put out their own browser.
Apropos of nothing much, but wasn’t that because the Japan Black paint was the only variety that would dry fast enough to support Ford’s production line engineering approach? MS have no comparable reason for IE.
It’s all about standards; if your company controls the standard, others have no choice but to follow you. When the browser wars started, each browser added more and more features as to attract more users, and hence become the ‘standard’.
If IE is dominant, for example, ActiveX applications and etc. would become more widely used, which means more developers using Microsoft tool; and on top of that, there is no IE for Macs, Linux and etc. Hence Microsoft could say “Forget about those guys; only a minority are using other browsers, just develop for IE” and sideline those browsers, and in essence, those OS as well. (Back then, if a page looked sucky on Mac, the usual thing to do is “Forget about those Mac-users. 70% (or more) of the world is using IE!”
In the same vein which is why Google is pushing out Chrome - I guess - it is to popularize Javascript-based applications (their Google Mail and Docs). If IE managed to popularize ActiveX (which never took off, and the honor for the most used external application for web development is now Flash), Microsoft gets to earn a lot and has a lot of developer base, which make them more dominant in the market.
That my two cent worth; though now with so many other browsers out there, I think Microsoft don’t really care (IE ships with Vista/XP and like it or not, MFC uses IE quite often and it’s often the fastest way to have Internet connectivity on a client application).
Right now, cross-browser compatibility is quite a big thing; Microsoft is trying (my guess) to counter with Silverlight, but how it goes I have no idea yet.
This is pretty much it, IMO. If the web browser becomes the dominant access mode for email/spreadsheet/movie viewing etc., then it is essentially the gatekeeper to the user. It becomes the key aspect of the user experience - Joe Punter accesses the web and everything else via Da Browsa. If Da Browsa runs agnostically on Linux/Mac/Solaris/NetBSD/AmigaOS/whatever, then Joe Punter can buy whatever is the cheapest hardware/OS combination capable of launching and running Da Browsa. This is very unlikely to generate much revenue for the MS/Intel duopoly. Hence the importance of making sure the web is dominated by websites that only run well in IE, since it makes people more likely to buy Windows so they can surf MySpace or whatever.
So. IE Dominant -> IE-biased internet -> People buy Windows to surf internet + MS stay in control of the user experience
(That’s an IMHO, so no cite :P)