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by Brad Wilson.
Original Post: Microsoft's Mega-Mistake
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Microsoft is mis-stepping. Seriously mis-stepping.
Last month, they announced the cancellation of IE for Windows, saying that new versions would only be part of OS upgrades and that their stand-alone browser was dead. Assuming they manage to ship Longhorn in 2005 (doubtful, given their deadline track record), and it takes 2 years to get good upgrade penetration, that means it'll be 2007 before we can assume something besides the fairly buggy and only moderately standards-compliant IE 6 -- assuming they're even interested in increasing their standards compliance.
This month, they announced the cancellation of IE for Mac (which was a far better browser than IE for Windows). Their claim is that user-requested features require tie-in into the OS, and since they don't control the OS, they're giving up altogether.
This is what Microsoft thinks will help them hold the browser market? Getting off of one platform entirely, and leaving an already 3 year old browser to sit for ANOTHER 4 years before it has good penetration? I've noticed a steady slide already of visitors to my site. Six months ago, the visitors were using Netscape/Mozilla about 1% of the time. Now it's 7%.
The only conclusion I can draw is that they think the web is dead. These are not the actions of a company that thinks the future is in the web.
Update: I should mention, in the context of that 7% quote, that IE has about 28% of the browser share at my site. That's right, if you count just Mozilla and IE, then it looks about 80/20 right now. That's a pretty significant in-road for Mozilla.
But I bet you're wondering where the rest of the content goes, if not to Mozilla or IE. The reality is that the vast majority of content here is served out to aggregators. The two aggregators that dwarf the rest here are NewsGator and SharpReader.
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