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IE The Great Microsoft Blunder? 643

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the not-a-shining-example-of-engineering dept.
JordanL writes "Hot on the heels of the beta rollouts of IE 7, comes an editorial from John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made. From the article: 'All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised [...] If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column--billions.'"
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IE The Great Microsoft Blunder? More

IE The Great Microsoft Blunder?

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  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ottothecow ( 600101 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:00PM (#15199597) Homepage
    From the tagging:

    troll, dvorak (ie stupid idiot)

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by diersing ( 679767 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:02PM (#15199619)
    "the bugs in IE?"

    Features, man, they're FEATURES!!

  • He he ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:03PM (#15199628) Homepage
    I see Slashdot's tagging system has become sort of a working dictionary in cases. The current tags say:
    [+] dvorak, ie, troll, stupid, idiot

    Why, yes, he's all of those things!!

    Amazing this new fangled technology -- how does it know?

  • Re:Reply: Yes, he is that stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:04PM (#15199640) Journal
    Dvorak is also the idiot who whined about how the Windows Idle Process was using 98% of CPU time and causing his computer to thrash. He simply doesn't have a clue. Why Slashdot isn't just rejecting submissions out flat that contain the word 'Dvorak' is a mystery (I mean they could even do it with a regular expression).

  • The tags sum it up nicely (Score:4, Funny)

    by mslinux ( 570958 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:06PM (#15199654)
    [+] troll, stupid, dvorak, ie, idiot (tagging beta)

  • Outsourcing and Active X controls (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:06PM (#15199662)
    I have already spent two hours today with Microsoft's phone service. My latest conversation...keep in mind that I fumbled through this because the employee was Indian and I couldn't understand his English. Outsourcing for computer assistance is not smart when it gets really technical and they cannot follow their click-through help screens.

    MS employee: "What can I help you with today?"
    Me: "I have a problem with IE 7.0. On IE 6.0.2, it worked fine this morning to log into our state

    government application and access payroll timesheet information but we cannot do it with 7.0. I think

    it may be some sort of javascript error because it will not even run the script when I click on the

    button."
    MS employee: "OK, who is your ISP provider?"
    Me: "Huh?"
    MS employee: "Who do you get your internet from?"
    Me: "It's a LAN. I work for the state government. I'm not sure who they buy their bandwidth from but

    we manage our own servers."
    MS employee: "No, no. Who do you call for your dial-up or cable modem?
    Me: "I don't. It's on a network."
    MS employee: "I do not understand. Who do you use to get your internet access?"
    Me: "Are you kidding me? I am on a LAN. That is a Local Access Network and means that we don't have to

    call anybody or connect. It is automatic. We have a number of servers that work together to run login

    scripts and provide both network and internet access."
    MS employee: "Hmmm. How many people connect on this network?"
    Me: "You need to know how many?"
    MS employee: "Yes."
    Me: "I don't know. 400? 600? Probably 600 within this building."
    MS employee: "Oh my god."

    After a few minutes of arguing with him that since the application problem is within IE 7.0 and not on our server, he refused to help me. I was told that he was only trained in workgroups and not domains. My response was that it was IE 7.0 that was causing the trouble. There were no problems with IE 6.0.2 this morning when I tried it. I hadn't changed domains or anything like that. It should work.

    MS employee: "Thank you but we will fix the problem before the full version. That is why it is a beta release."
    Me: "What do you mean you will fix the problem?"
    MS Employee: "It will work in the final release."
    Me: "But I haven't even told you the exact problem. You keep asking me about domains and workgroups and I told you it was something else."
    MS Employee: "Yes, I know and Microsoft will fix it."
    Me: "I don't believe you. You don't even know what the problem is. If you did, you would have hopefully fixed it before you released the beta. And if I don't help you out with this and tell you the problem so your programmers know what to fix, it won't work in the final version either."
    MS Employee: "I understand this. Thank you."
    Me: "Wait. Do you have somebody that can talk to me---like your boss?"
    MS Employee: "Yes, please hold."

    And I wait for another 10 minutes. The boss gets on and is actually competent in trouble-shooting. He takes me through some steps with the Computer Management and in the Internet Security Settings. Then, I open IE 7.0 again to see if the problem is still there. It is.

    MS boss: "What do you see?"
    Me: "The same thing as before. I try to click on the submit input button to pull up the form but nothing happens. The mouse-over just changes the text color but the javascript isn't executed like it was in IE 6.0"
    MS Employee: "Do you get an error? Can you read me the error message?"
    Me: I read him the message.
    MS Employee: "Can you spell everything out for me?"
    Me: I spell it all out and then he requests the URL in the error message so I begin to spell out the website address.
    MS Employee: "Wait, what was that?"
    Me: "Dot C-O-M."
    MS Employee: "Can you repeat that?"
    Me: "Period. C-O-M"
    MS Employee: "Please, spell that last part out."
    Me: "It IS spelled out. It's the ending on the last part of the website. It's the generic extension like Microsoft DO

  • Re:Dvorak, same as usual, all wet (Score:3, Funny)

    by linvir ( 970218 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:11PM (#15199700)
    Where does he get the $billions cost from?
    Not for the first time, I'm tempted to post a goatse link as a serious answer.

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:4, Funny)

    by AlephZero ( 640601 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:12PM (#15199713)
    "Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows."

    Um, if your house doesn't have windows or doors the burglars can just walk in.
  • Impossible.

    Microsoft has testified in court [salon.com] that IE cannot be separated from the "Core OS", whatever that means.

    Therefore, what you say cannot be true :)

    QED

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ryan Amos ( 16972 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:27PM (#15199854)
    As with most things in life, a good gas powered chain saw will do the job in a tenth of the time, and it's a lot more fun.

    Just make sure there aren't any electrical conduit where you're making your hole. That might make it less fun.

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by saider ( 177166 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:32PM (#15199902)
    You can get into most houses these days with a knife and 5 minutes by going right through the wall.

    5 minutes is 4 minutes and 50 seconds too long in a yard with a 120lb mastiff on the prowl.

  • Re:Don't Reply (Score:2, Funny)

    by tkdog ( 889567 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:39PM (#15199972) Journal
    Come on - this guy hasn't had anything good since he invented the keyboard, or a keyboard, or something.

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:2, Funny)

    by operagost ( 62405 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:44PM (#15200040) Homepage Journal
    Are you the type of guy who walks into Dunkin' Donuts, points at the Munchkins and says, "LIAR! If those were really donut holes, they'd be full of AIR!"

  • Inauthentic (Score:2, Funny)

    by Tanlis ( 304135 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:48PM (#15200066)
    If you take Dvorak's article and plug it into the Inauthentic paper detector mentioned in the article above this on the main page.

    It finds that the text has been classified as INAUTHENTIC with a 25.7% chance of being authentic text.

    I find that true for anything Dvorak says.

  • Re:Stupid Idiot? (Score:3, Funny)

    by visgoth ( 613861 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:52PM (#15200116)
    <nerd>

    Stupid idiots have low WIS and INT scores. Smart idiots have high INT but low WIS.

    </nerd>

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:3, Funny)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @05:13PM (#15200299)
    Is anybody else noticing how many aricles are being tagged "troll"? Won't make for a very good indexing mechanism is every third article has the same keyword...
    Yeah, it'll be pretty useless - unless you're looking for Dvorak articles. ;-)

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Flame0001 ( 818040 ) <Flame0001@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @05:43PM (#15200521)
    If your house doesn't have Windows, then you can be sure that you'll have a chair through your wall. ;)

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:3, Funny)

    by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @05:44PM (#15200533)
    My personal favorite is looking for the dupe tag. One day there was 5 or 6 on the front page.

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @06:21PM (#15200828)
    I can be done.

    No one doubts that you can, sir. The question is, at what cost?

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @06:24PM (#15200841)
    All hail the Power of Dvorak...the only force in the universe so despised, that he is capable getting /.'ers to rush to the defense of Microsoft.

  • New project: fix Slashdotter to filter out Dvorak (Score:3, Funny)

    by sinewalker ( 686056 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @07:59PM (#15201393) Homepage
    Great, I've found a new project to work on while on my train-trips home: alter the Slashdotter firefox plugin so that it filters out any post containing the regex "[jJ]onh [dD]vorak". Also any post made by Zonk.

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:2, Funny)

    by ccollao ( 227727 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @08:36PM (#15201602) Homepage
    "Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows."

    Put it better as: Burglars couldn't get into your system if you had no Windows or Gates! ;)

  • Re:Definitely not 0 profit... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ignavus ( 213578 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2006 @12:51AM (#15202571)
    "Just make sure there aren't any electrical conduit where you're making your hole. That might make it less fun."

    That is a bit self-centred of you - it would be great fun for all the people watching you.

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