techno.blog("Dion")

NOTE: It goes without saying, but to be clear, none of my thoughts here are related to Mozilla itself

Mitchell Baker has a post on the EC prelim conclusion on Microsoft and IE:

From EC: “Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”

Mitchell has some very interesting points, and the two high level ones that stick out at me are:

They did a bad bad thing

In my mind, there is absolutely no doubt that the statement above is correct. Not the single smallest iota of doubt. I’ve been involved in building and shipping web browsers continuously since before Microsoft started developing IE, and the damage Microsoft has done to competition, innovation, and the pace of the web development itself is both glaring and ongoing.

Bloody hell, coming up with a remedy that is fair and good for the Web is tough!

There are separate questions of whether there is a good remedy, and what that remedy might be.

…

The extent of the damage is so great that it makes it difficult to figure out an effective and timely remedy. I believe it’s worth some effort to try.

Thinking about the users, you end up at PPK’s point: 0 or 5. Hard indeed.

Also, take a good look at the entire Mitchell post as it is really interesting to see how Firefox has grown despite of the barriers, and that Microsoft shouldn’t be able to use it as a “see, look what can be done.”

Bizarre times indeed.

Dare is back to blogging, which I like to see. His latest piece though is about a so-called exodus of Googlers going to Microsoft.

NOTE: An exodus is:

a departure or emigration, usually of a large number of people

He notes a couple of blogs talking about a move, including Danny Thorpe and Sergey Solyanik. I am sure there are more, but an exodus is a bit rough. However, I could quite as easily discuss the number of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple (insert other companies) folks that I get to work with at Google. The problem is that this is meaningless. We are looking at the micro-level, through our lens working in our areas at our companies.

I am sure that in the coming week, there we will be some musical chairs at companies as large as ours. That is the way the world turns. Many people move on, they try new things, they want to work on something else etc. Especially in this day and age.

How about we get back to technology again, and look at the great work that all of these companies are doing. All the industry wants to talk about with respect to Yahoo! is some executives leaving. However, I have met with a lot of Yahoo! engineers in the last few weeks and they are working on exciting projects. Yahoo! has a LOT of users. They are a great company, born of the Web, and they never seem to get the credit their deserve. How many websites have you created with that many users? Phenomenal.

Dare, your company is doing great things too. I would be much more excited to hear more about that side of things, than employee counting. I would be much more excited to see our companies work together to progress the Web, as well as competing in various industries.

Enough SOAP opera, let’s give it a REST (sorry….). I normally don’t get into these kind of topics, but the general talk has been grating me recently, and I want to hear something fresh and new.

I have been playing with some Web technology and have been astonished at how far it has come in many ways. There is still a long way to go, and much we can all improve, but I am pretty jazzed about the technology whilst at the same time frustrated with the non-tech talk.

Maybe it is a time to get a bunch of engineers together and talk tech… maybe in Hawaii? Anyone in? :)