The Great Microsoft Blunder

I love cranky geek John Dvorak's outrageous opinions. They are always entertaining and occasionally insightful. His latest pronouncement is that Internet Explorer should be killed because it's cost Microsoft billions and created most of their problems. He's probably right.

"If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security problems. 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.

All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. 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."

Of course, John also realizes that Microsoft is a creature of habit and won't abandon IE, no matter how painful it is.