Joel's Poor Analogy

There are already some decent responses to Joel’s Martian Handsets article, but what the heck, here’s my addition to the flame:

His analogy is conveniently simple. The reality is much more complex. Most specifically, Microsoft isn’t some innocent browser implementer, but a convicted predatory monopolist on this very matter. They attempted to subvert the web standards of the time, and pushed their own, proprietary solutions. The current standards do have their problems, but Microsoft clearly and specifically did not implement standards and technologies of the time and then left their product to rot for years. So I, for one, don’t have a lot of sympathy for the difficult position they find themselves in.

Joel wants us to excuse Microsoft again (“Think of the poor users! Your wife, even!”) and blame it on the poor standards and Trotskyist idealists. Meanwhile, three other major browsers have been doing a pretty good job at implementing and evolving the web standards without breaking the web. Sounds fairly pragmatic to me. Moreover while Redmond has ignored them, web developers and designers have grown in number and organized. And now they’re tired of bending over for Microsoft.

The market is finally punishing Microsoft for these mistakes. IE is losing market share and will continue to lose market share. And yes, no matter what decision Microsoft makes at this point, they’re going to lose. But this is the bed they made. The W3C didn’t do this. The web standards advocates didn’t do this. Microsoft made these mistakes on their own, largely by abusing and then disengaging the community.

So let’s not be silly and think the world can be easily bifurcated into idealists and pragmatists. Framing the problem this way won’t make the real nuances disappear, nor will they save Microsoft from themselves.