isitreal - 5:02 pm on Jul 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

MS has always had a certain scorn for the web, that's why they've lagged behind consistently, whether it's the initial decision to even make a browser, a search engine, or a portal.

Simply put, I don't believe any of the MS brass, including gates, really likes the web that much, or cares about it, except when it looks like maybe they can start generating cash by trying to gain control of some part of it by installing another default app into Windows, like Windows media player, to try to get cash flow going through drm type garbage.

Opensource, on the other hand, wouldn't exist if it weren't for the web, it's built on it. MS is built around a closed network, with a centralized structure, it's the model they understand, and it's the model they project out onto the world as the most desirable way for things to work. It's the model they tried to cram down the corporate world's throat, was that palladium?, where all data is centralized on ms servers. Initiative drops like a lump of lead, totally rejected.

Stopping development on IE 6 is just one manifestation of this ambivalence towards the web and all that is web related. However, when you stop development on something as complex as a browser for 2.5 years while Gecko/Opera/KHTML are raging full steam ahead, something is going to change. One problem for MS of course is that they don't make money off IE, in fact it costs them money, unless they can leverage stuff like default search page msn into actual cash flow.

One possible reason MS doesn't like the web? It's built on fully open standards, not controlled by MS. Well, they tried, active x, XAL [I think], vbscript etc.

If MS didn't occupt a near monopoly position on the desktop, there would be equally universal non proprietary document standards, and they would work as well as the web standards currently do.