This is quite simply one of the most appalling and disgusting abuses of corporate marketing muscle I have ever seen, and I am furious on a level I can scarcely begin to describe. My livelihood depends on my ability to develop user-friendly, attractive, and functional web sites and applications. I owe a serious debt of gratitude to the Mozilla foundation and Joe Hewitt (creator of the Firebug extension) for the extensibility and development tools that make my job so much easier. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is the bane of my existence (as any well-versed developer will tell you). Microsoft's insufferably slow pace to implement anything remotely resembling standards, the fact that those "standards" seldom bear much MORE than a passing resemblance to the W3C version, and their obstinate rebellion against the whole standardization movement (despite the undeniable fact that, like it or not, we all use the SAME WEB), frequently turn minute work into hours of laborious suffering, which costs my employer a great deal of money (not to mention whittles away at my sanity). For the record, I have used every version of Internet Explorer since 1.0, and have a fair amount of experience sorting out the same kinds of problems in 8.0 as I did in 7.0, 6.0, 5.5, 5.0, and so on. I can tell you quite solidly that Internet Explorer 8 is but a narrow departure from prior offerings and offers nothing significant except an interpretation of standards that is still broken, but broken differently (which means I'll have to rebuild my apps yet again). And the worst part is, the average user doesn't know what they're missing. They've never used Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera. They don't understand what a pleasant experience they're missing out on. Or if they've used these vastly superior products, when they come across the website that was coded ONLY for Internet Explorer, the site appears broken to them, and so they quickly abandon them. They rely on Microsoft, who owns their soul by virtue of the operating system they live their life through, to tell them what to believe. And so for Microsoft to release this article, this blatantly bold-faced-lie-soaked Filth, is NOT merely a humorous anecdote to me. It is a blatant attack on my profession, on my sanity, and on all the people who will miss out on many other opportunities as a result. It is also an attempt to undermine all that I've worked for by convincing people, through a pretty-looking piece of bottom-of-the-scum-chain-dishonest propaganda, that the web they know can only be experienced properly by succumbing to the use of a product that is, in every possible way, drastically inferior. For a company that has pioneered lows in the past few years, Microsoft has sunk to the deepest abyss imaginable -- they are using their dominant market position NOT just to sell people an inferior product, but to force-feed the people filthy lies and deception, and to crush and destroy any innovation that might otherwise be occurring in this market.

How is this any different than Infrared networking? I mean, aside from the potential for using your Christmas tree decorations as a WAP?