Category: "Web media"

Microsoft killing the browser: scary movie...

Sometimes I fear that Microsoft stopping the development of IE 6 is a lot worse than we think...

It looks more and more like they have a master plan beyond terminating the free browser program... (we don't care, we have open source browsers, right?)... Actually, it looks like they plan to terminate the browser concept itself.

With their .NET client technology, they actually intend to promote applications that directly and transparently connect to web-services. You don't "see" the internet any more. What you see, is the funky XP GUI interface of a native Windows application!

Once most online services will work only with their dedicated Windows client (yeah the providers don't care, that's 95% of their market anyway), what's the use of a free open source browser going to be? Oh yeah... it will let you browse the old, poorly maintained, "compatible" w-e-b-site (which already only works well in IE! :/)

Wow! Waking up... I just had a terrible nightmare! Luckily something like this could never happen... right?   right?

2015 update: something like this is actually happening with phone apps... Ironic? ... or did someone take a page out of Microsoft's early century book?

When the browser wars began...

Eric Sink has this very interesting piece about how he witnessed the beggining of the browser wars, working at Spyglass (the company that licensed the original IE rendering engine to Miscrosoft).

About Spyglass:

"We considered ourselves to be the arms dealer for the browser wars."


Google & BlogNoise: an advertiser's perspective

Ray Ozzie writes [link gone]:

Scoble says [link gone] Google is getting a lot of pressure from its advertisers to push down weblogs, who might lower their search result rankings. This seems counterintuitive to me. By diluting the commercial effectiveness of the first N search results, don't blogs actually increase the value of Sponsored Links?

=>I guess advertisers don't believe in color boxed sponsored links themselves! :>>

By the way, Robert Scoble [link gone] mentions this about advertisers:

The fact that when you search for "NEC Tablet" and you find me, for instance, might really piss off NEC. Since NEC advertises on Google, [...]

=> It seems to me that Microsoft are the ones playing this one the smartest way again: they send info, demo, invitations, etc. to bloggers in order to try and get positive "independant" press on high-visibility blogs! Evil but smart! :>