Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 02/11/2001

News filters in of the DoJ/Microsoft case being settled -- on terms very advantageous to Microsoft. Doubtless there'll be megabytes spilled over this subject over the following days, but it comes as little surprise. Microsoft hasn't been acting like a cowed company of late -- quite the opposite -- and it's clear that it in no way cares what the government thinks of its actions.

There remains one way to tame the rampant beast of Redmond, as shown by the MSN fiasco earlier this week. Microsoft changed its MSN Web site so that visitors using non-Internet Explorer browsers were told that there was an 'error' and that they should 'upgrade to IE'. Microsoft later said that this was a mistake; everyone else said it was barefaced cheek. I'm with the latter, and am happy to report that it caused a huge increase in people going off to try these other browsers on the back of the publicity it generated.

I think 2002 should be the Year We Do It Differently. There are loads of non-Microsoft options out there, and every time MS tries to fence us in just a little more, we should go out and try just a little harder to keep our options open. And we'll see what we can do at ZDNet to promote diversity, freedom and perhaps just a little bit of feistiness.

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