Massive payment to Opera from Microsoft

[francis]

Some may remember a particularly nasty incident a while back where Microsoft deliberately coded pages on MSN (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/msn/) to not work or to degrade badly in Opera. Opera may only be a tiny force in the browser market, but the development community were not impressed. Anyway, in a superb victory against Microsoft's bully-boy tactics, Opera have announced a payment of $12.75M dollars to them by MS to avoid a possible lawsuit (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39155572,00.htm). Fantastic!

[Tom]

I share your pleasure in seeing MS brought down a peg. According to Fortune, all the money comes from Windows+Office. This has given them an amazing bank balance. But they have not managed to invest it in anything which makes money. The X Box is a typical example. It jogs along but it does not rake in cash.

Why doesn't IBM, which touts Linux as the greatest thing on earth, invest in a PC equivalent of Mac OS X? I just can't understand it.

[James]

Hilarious, Opera's not threatening Microsoft's browser dominance, so why would they do this?

Problem is, Microsoft isn't going to flinch at $12.75 million.

Was this a Microsoft coder being cheeky? Or was it a decision made on high in Microsoft?

[francis]

If you read the first link I put up, there's a bit of a clue, but not much. What's more hilarious is the absolute lies that MS spouted:


“All of our development work for the new MSN.com is ... W3C standard,” said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for web technologies. “For browsers that we know don’t support those standards or that we can’t insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the standards.”


That, as anyone who knows about MS' attitude towards coding standards will know, is an outlight lie.

As for who was responsible, I guess we'll never know. As the content in my second link says, $12.75M isn't a great deal to MS - but that's not the point. They did bad and, for some reason, they felt it necessary to pay that than to go to court.

Over the last day or so, I've been pondering the ALA article. I wonder how people in MS' IE team must feel when their peers, IT professionals working on the Web, constantly criticise their work. Do you think it gets them down, or do you think there's nothing they can do about it and they do the best they can?