Innovate or Die!

Remember the big browser war of the 90s when Netscape was vanquished by IE, never to rise again.. Netscape in a final dying act handed over its code to the open source community and thus the Mozilla project was born. Of course, Mozilla sucked just as bad as Netscape, but over the years, it has silently got its act together. The best thing it did was to split the bulky program into a thin browser and an equally thin email client. While Thunderbird, the email client, does not offer all the functionality of Outlook, I have been using it happily for over a year. The same goes for the light browser Firefox (The Browser Formerly Known As Firebird). Browsing with the downloaded version of Firefox can be a pretty plain experience, but it has a vast army of plugins which can help you do wonders with your browsing. Best of all, it does not support ActiveX which has been the biggest irritant in my browsing experience (ergo all the webpages which popup messages saying "Do you want to install the latest games update?" No, No, No... go away!). Of course, if you want to use Windows Update, you still need to use IE.

What has Microsoft been doing all this time? Precisely nothing. After it won the browser war, it decided to rest its gigantic arse and move on to find fresh battles. It has not released even a single update to IE that has improved the browser experience. (security patches notwithstanding) Cut to Mozilla and Opera which have introduced the best browsing improvement ever - tabbed browsing! (Now you don't have to open fifteen windows while browsing for porn). There are several RSS aggregators that you can plug into Firefox and Apple has announced the integration of RSS and Atom into their next release of Safari. Not to be left behind in the race to innovate, Microsoft has announced that it will not be releasing any further version of Internet Explorer. So apart from the security patches, if you want the next release, you have to wait for the next OS (which judging by optimistic estimates will be available in 2007, which means that you have to wait until 2009 to get a stable release with service pack 2).

I'm not a fanatic Microsoft hater, but the lethargy of Microsoft when it comes to innovating and improving the user experience frankly gets to me. Windows XP did improve a lot upon Windows 98, but it's sad that the Windows using world has to wait until 2007/2009 to get the next improvement. In the computing world, this the equivalent of 5 lifetimes. Apple has introduced a new version of its OSX every year for the past three years and the preview of the next version, Tiger has me drooling for a mac. Hopefully Microsoft will get its act together soon since the vast majority of computer users cannot use Linux for its complexity and Macs for their price. MIcrosoft is being upstaged in every field by small innovators. The Internet search engine and even desktop search is almost the domain of Google, the browser wars are tilted in favour of Mozilla and the server community is almost entirely the domain of Linux/Apache. The desktop user may be the last bastion of hope for Microsoft and I for one feel no pity.