Microsoft Going the IBM Route

A quick thought about this C|Net Interview with Bill G.

So in this interview, Bill Gates repeats the standard marketing line about Microsoft, competitive factors, Apple iPods, and such.

However, halfway through the interview, he takes an interesting route to respond to the fact that Firefox is making significant headway against IE.

Here's what he says: "Well, people get confused about browsers. You can have as many browsers as you want on your PC, just like you can have tons of music players and things like that. So when people say Firefox is being downloaded onto people's systems, that's true, but IE is also on those systems. Firefox is new, and people are trying it out. There's a certain percentage of people who do that--it's very easy to download."

Okay, does anyone else remember that IBM said almost exactly the same thing about OS/2 Warp and Windows -- "you can load both, and it don't matter that people have both loaded on their machines, because WE'RE still on the machine."

Bullshit, Bill.

IBM left the OS business after saying stupid things like this. When are you going to leave the browser business?