Why extending Microsoft oversight is bad for business.

More states want to extend Microsoft oversight: report Supposedly states have been protecting small businesses from Microsoft and want to extend oversight from the 2002 antitrust settlement that is about to expire. All they appear to have achieved is higher prices. They are targeting the inequalities in the operating system. The government has yet to hear about Web 2.0 and software as a service, though someone at the state level do know enough to tax it. The browser not the operating system is what Microsoft is using to eliminate its competition. Microsoft does not fix bugs or even seriously field reports about bugs. They have reduced the memory in the browser at a time when the operating system has more memory than ever to share. This is because more memory to run applications in the browser competes with their server farm services, server farms that cost over a billion dollars (US). But this can actually be a positive for some programmers. Since the browser has not seen much change it has allowed programmers years to become experts. Developers who know how to optimize memory usage and have custom patches for the bugs and memory leaks have a valuable skill set. If the government really wanted to help they would not tax these new small businesses at three or four times the rate foreign companies are taxed. And to make money available to reduce these taxes they can eliminate the commission that failed to accomplish anything useful.

Microsoft Help

After finding several bugs in Internet Explorer that I am not sure Microsoft knows about I called them. I spent two days on the phone. After talking to about a dozen support employees in India (and one in the USA) they never found anyone who was familiar with the product. I decided to try the online help one more time Microsoft Help Forum. I discovered why I was not able to submit my question on the Microsoft site. Apparently I made the mistake of using the Microsoft browser. The Microsoft web site uses pop-ups and as a part of my phone help I reset my browser to default settings which block pop-ups. So if you want to use Microsoft on-line help disable the IE pop-up blocker.

Cut and Copy broken in Internet Explorer

The commands oncopy, oncut, onbeforecopy, onbeforecut are broken in IE 6.0 and IE 7.0. I was unable to report these problems to Microsoft (see blog below). If a field is empty and copy or cut is used the browser does not report the event. This means that if the web page code has undo or any validation in the script or server side it will misfire. Google has an interesting fix for this in Google Spreadsheets. They never allow an empty field to be empty. They place a tab character in the field so that appears empty but really is not. However this took hundreds of lines of code to accomplish and has another problem. The browser does not allow focus on the field. If you do focus it does the tab and moves the focus to the next field. Onbeforecopy has an even bigger problem in IE 6.0. If you wand over edit in the drop down menu it fires the event. I was unable to actually do anything with this event. But if this is actually being fired by using the drop down menu could you trigger an event in the menu or use it to spy on the user. Does this focus go beyond the page you are currently in? Given that this could be a major security hole I am no longer using Onbeforecopy in any of my code. Since this HTML is only supported by Microsoft, web pages that support other browser do not use it.

Vista File Type Broken

Vista tries to open Word documents created in earlier versions of Office in Paint. You have to save the file and do an open as because Paint is not yet smart enough to read Word files (.doc). Not that many people probably use email or Word together (sarcasm). I was an idiot and called Microsoft to report my list of errors. Yes I checked if anyone else had already reported them. I am no longer sure why Microsoft answers the phone. I was on hold for two days and spoke to about a dozen people. None of them had the authority to do anything. Even after they did recognize that I appeared to know what I was talking about and that indeed there is a problem. They had nothing in their book about what to do. I did talk to someone in the US and they said the only option they could offer was to mail it and supplied a mail address (not email, regular mail). While on hold for two days I watched movies and watched the new premiers. I like the new Kitchen Nightmare series. Journey man has a great concept but failed to capitalize on the angel angle. I think they could just do the sister angle on Bionic Woman. It worked on Inspector Gadget (Penny).