Preach It, Michael!!

Michael Farnum is more than a little upset with Microsoft for their comments regarding a new bug that has been discovered in IE Vista.


I don't blame him. It makes me mad as well. Why do software companies think that they can just do what they want as they want. Is it because we don't have much of a say or what we say doesn't really matter to them. Once a company reaches a point where they hold a large part of the market for a type of software they just seem to quit caring. They forget who brought them to the dance. Many people don't have much of a choice but to continue to use their software because it is the standard. It is what everyone else uses and if they switch to another vendor then it makes it harder to share files with other business partners and most companies don't want to have to deal with it.

If Microsoft is really concerned with security as they keep telling us that they are then they need to be concerned about ALL of security. That includes availability as well as confidentiality and integrity. What good is data that is confidential and that hasn't been altered if it can't be accessed by those who need it. I know that many people think that IE is a web browser used to play on the Internet, but it's much more than that. Microsoft even bills it as a business critical application and they encourage companies to port applications to browser based so that IE can be used to access the data. I know that in my company IE is CRITICAL. If it fails then we fail. Our main business app relies on IE to the extent that it won't work properly in FireFox, Opera, Safari or any other browser.

I take up Michael's cry of "Microsoft, FIX IT!" and I think that all of us need to rally around this. It's time that software companies get the message that we won't be walked over.