Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the elderly, Microsoft has announced it will be phasing Internet Explorer out of its products.
The end of Internet Explorer is nigh, and the cause of death, surprisingly, won’t be a crash.
But before you dislocate your hip and type up a strongly worded email through your AOL account, do not fret too much.
Microsoft is going about this in true Internet Explorer fashion, and you can expect an excruciatingly slow process.
Unlike Internet Explorer’s all-too-common “not responding” message, Microsoft is responding to the unsalvageable poor reputation of the Internet Explorer name by creating a new browser in an effort titled “Project Spartan.”
It’s really more of a rebranding thing than anything else. We just hope Microsoft won’t be spartan with its ?improvements.
In defense of Microsoft, it went wrong in two critical ways.
Back in the mid-1990s, Microsoft was pretty late to the browser game, considering the Internet was already a tepid commodity in the technology world.
Even then, Microsoft was relatively uninterested in this new frontier; ?operating systems were its game.
But when upstart Netscape produced a browser — Netscape Navigator — designed to render operating systems ancillary, Microsoft couldn’t just stand by and let itself become ?irrelevant. That’s Apple’s job.
Microsoft threw together a web browser to become a part of its operating system in a successful move to edge out the competitor, which essentially didn’t have as big a name or a pre-existing operating system behind it like Microsoft to give it invaluable traction in the tug-of-war for cyberspace.
And when we say the folks at Microsoft threw their dog into the ring, they actually sent in a puppy. People like puppies more, so the puppy won even though it maybe shouldn’t have if you think about which browser hound was better trained compared to the Netscape Navigator mutt.
Then comes the second way in which Microsoft screwed the pooch. When you haphazardly whip up a mediocre browser, people eventually start to realize its mediocrity.
People realize quickly when said mediocre browser has a near monopoly on browser usage, especially from businesses that develop their software and IT around Internet Explorer ?compatibility.
And then enters Internet Explorer 6, which was the abysmal iteration that sealed its fate.
With a legendary deuce of a browser that reached meme-level infamy, there was no going back. The Internet that the browser helped forge would be its undoing.
Microsoft released later versions of the browser to make things right, but things were still going to go wrong for it as long as the same name was attached. It’d be like naming other ships ?“Titanic” or other television ?shows “Glee.”
Adding a bunch of fancy cannons to a sinking ship just means your sinking ship now has more fancy cannons — and it’s heavier.
Microsoft’s renaming could troubleshoot its strife with the Spartan reboot.
But based on its track record, Microsoft should probably stick to what it does best: Word.
