Last Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was onstage at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to unveil a beta of an updated version of Internet Explorer, a Web browser that's been begging for new security features -- let alone a facelift -- for ages.
Microsoft promoted the introduction as a big deal. Naturally, I thought my interlocutor would jump at the opportunity. C'mon, I thought, run some jive about how IE is all ready to rout those pests from the Mozilla Foundation once and for all.
Instead I was left high and dry. All I got was marketing mumbo-jumbo about how the company strives to do good by its customers and that's the ultimate payoff -- and so on and so forth.
Maybe that's the standard PR practice "going forward," as the jargon-meisters are wont to say. But Microsoft wasn't always so reluctant to speak frankly. In fact, the company was damn good at sticking it to the competition.
During the early 1990s rivalry with IBM's OS/2, Microsoft pulled out all the stops to make sure reporters were convinced the world was a better place because of Windows. Microsoft's marketing prowess came in handy because IBM had a better product. The reason OS/2 failed was because Big Blue was utterly inept at making its case.
Microsoft executives had no compulsions about trashing Netscape.
A similar scenario played out later in the decade during the so-called browser wars. Microsoft executives had no compulsions about trashing Netscape -- publicly or privately -- to reporters. (Was it really true that Marc Andreessen was "a cheeseburger-addicted frat boy," as I recall hearing during one singular briefing back then.)
Again, the stakes were high. Netscape sought to replace Microsoft Windows with its Navigator Web browser as the de facto application development platform for personal computers. Had the strategy succeeded, Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today would be pumping gas for a living.
History obviously worked out differently. IE ultimately caught up and then surpassed Navigator. The company's aggressiveness also ran afoul of antitrust statutes and Microsoft wound up in a drawn-out court battle with the US Justice Department.
Firefox poses the latest challenge. The Mozilla folks say they have registered more than 25 million downloads since the release of Firefox 1.0 last November. Not too shabby a performance, even if some of those 25 million happen to be multiple downloads. Full disclosure: Yours truly switched from IE to Firefox last fall and hasn't regretted the decision for a second.
Microsoft's brass remains low-key, but the competition from Firefox is forcing the company to step things up. The beta version of IE 7 for XP SP2 will be ready later this summer. For Microsoft, which fought tooth and nail over the years to keep the browser fused to the Windows operating system, this is quite a big deal.
It's a gamble, but it's also a sensible idea. The next version of Windows is due out sometime in 2006, and Microsoft is notorious for missing shipping dates for the release of operating systems. Microsoft can't wait another two years to answer the challenge from Firefox. But if the interim browser update fails to stem the tide, get ready for a flood of verbal pyrotechnics coming out of Redmond.
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Charles Cooper is the executive editor of commentary at CNET News.com.
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Well, let's here it for Microsoft --> Boo hoo! Or should that be --> Boo boo!
I hope Microsoft crash & burn. In fact I would love to see Billy, not to be confused with Wobbledagger (the noted thespian from England), go down in a heap both financially & legally for the crap he has heaped onto so many with his "wonderful" Microsoft. As for Internet Explorer, the dullest product of the millenium & ongoing years, may it die a slow & painful death & take bloody Microsoft down with it.
May Open Source purge the excrement known as Microsoft from the face of the digital era. To coin a Douglas Adams phrase; "So long & thanks for all the fish!"