Jerry, I've written a lot about that in the past (where to draw the line), mostly after the previous court date and subsequent trade press coverage. To reiterate, I don't think it's near as hard as it's being made out to be. My impression at this point is that the design of IE/Windows is reasonable and modular, not arbitrarily ugly for "competitive" purposes. IE seems to be "integrated" pretty much the way Office is "integrated", with a COM interface callable from everywhere. Well, the whole "dll hell" thing is sort of ugly, but that predates IE. Of course, there's this other definition of "IE= every change made to the Windows 95 runtime since the retail release", but that doesn't fit very well with "the browser product".
Anyway, as additional evidence, I offer this quote, from this weeks testimony:
Microsoft attorney Steven Holley asked Cole: "The court has ordered Microsoft to give OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] a version of Windows 95 without IE. What would Microsoft have to do to allow other applications to access the Web [without IE]?"
Cole said: "We would have to add back some files, change install scripts, and make sure it works. So we would have to do quite a bit of work."
Note this is pure Microsoft testimony, not a random comment on cross examination. "Quite a bit of work" is quite relative here. Sure, it's more work than shipping OEMs the retail release and the lobotomized current release that won't boot. The former is off the shelf, and no need to do any testing on the latter. But, by their own testimony, it's not like it's back to the drawing board for a massive redesign. Add back some files, change install scripts, make sure it works. Not exactly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, though I'm sure it could be milked for a month or two delay in the Win98 release if necessary.
Cheers, Dan. |
