So Microsoft wants Yahoo. Should I give a hoot?
Not on the surface. Yahoo lost my interest years ago. The ads, absent from the cool Yahoo of old, became overbearing. So I switched to Alta Vista, then Google, where I remain today as my home page/search engine of choice.
Yahoo has become Grandma's home page, in case Grandma has managed to connect to the web without the help of AOL.
But that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo is the #1 visited site on the web. And giving Microsoft that kind of power is scary.
Microsoft, simply put, wants world domination.
For that matter, so does Google. But I see two distinctly different ways of dealing with customers here. Google wants your web-based business. Will they someday want your business on an unconnected desktop computer? Perhaps. But, by and large, Google has stuck by their "first do no harm" policy. Additionally, Google has supported the WWW standards well. Their Gmail interface, for example, fires up and runs perfectly in a standard web browser without requiring add-ons.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has their own way of doing things. If you want to run MS technology, then, in their minds, you need to be running a MS O/S, MS software, and nothing else.
Indeed, MS makes it difficult for anyone running Firefox, Thunderbird, or even non-MS commercial products to integrate seamlessly with their various offerings. Do you want Active-X to work? Just use IE! Why mess with Thunderbird? Outlook Express is your email client!
And if you (shudder) elect to use something other than Windows to run your computer, you're absolutely, positively on your own.
Not only that, but MS revels in tormenting their customers. Updates and service packs remain free, but they insist on the installation of WGA, crapware whose only purpose in life is to determine whether your copy of Windows/Office/whatever might be pirated. If it is determined by the program that the answer is yes, you are nagged and inconvenienced until you relent and contact MS to make things good.
Why do people put up with it?
My Ubuntu never makes such accusations. Neither does my vintage Win2K virtual machine I run for the occasional app that won't work outside of Windows. But add/remove too much hardware, or make some sort of system change that fubars the authentication algorithm, and suddenly, you are a pirate in Redmond's eyes.
The thing that bugs me about the Yahoo deal is the first thing I see MS doing is putting Active X, Silverlight, or any other of their technologies that are irreversibly tied to their asp.net juggernaut on the site so that Grandma has to be running IE for Yahoo to work right.
This fits in perfectly with MS's philosophy of ignoring existing standards and plowing ahead with their own proprietary creations that, most of the time, don't work as well as their standards-based counterparts.
Someday Google may rule computers.l When/if that day ever comes, there will be many detractors out there who want the king overthrown. But I hope that an honest look is taken at the basic philosophy of how Google vs. MS treat their customers.
WGA, combined with the ever-more-integrated-at-the-cost-of-performance DRM that is deeply imbedded in MS, drove this geek to Linux. Anyone else want to join me?
