Microsoft Plays Nicely with IT Departments – Lets Block Internet Explorer 8 Installations
January 07, 2009 |
There’s a pretty interesting move today from Microsoft that looks like the software giant does not want to be criticized by IT professionals again. This time they want to offer IT departments to control how Internet Explorer 8 will be installed in their organizations once it is pushed at the users via Automatic Updater.
Microsoft will make the newest version of its Internet Explorer browser (losing the market share but still the distant market leader) available via Automatic Updater and via their software update sites – Windows Update and Microsoft Update. And while some people will be glad to download the browser as soon as it is available, there will also be others – those who will prefer to wait for early adopters to find the majority of bugs and for Microsoft to fix these bugs.
The usual concern in IT departments is that once some new software is introduced to the market and is available for download, eager users will want to install it on their office computers and in some cases incompatibility with existing installed applications can cause totally unpredicted difficulties. To avoid this situation once Internet Explorer 8 is available for installation via automatic update, Microsoft has decided to offer IE8 Blocker Toolkit for IT departments to install them in advance and prevent users from installing the browser the IT specialists don’t trust yet.
I have a feeling that during the year 2009 the new browser war will be one of the most interesting things to watch in the internet industry with Google trying to promote Chrome as much as it can, Microsoft launching Internet Explorer 8 (which has tons of interesting features many thought were invented by Google for Chrome) and Mozilla also progressing with Firefox 3. So many events are scheduled to happen during this year in this field that I am quite sure it will be a fascinating battle to watch for everyone.
But of course any war is particularly interesting in how the enemies behave and what tools they use and the new browser war will be no exception. So it will be interesting to see how browser developers will fight with each other striving to leadership or at least to maintaining or increasing their market shares. And while usually one expects Microsoft to be pretty aggressive and use its distribution channels to its full advantage everywhere they can – and of course corporate customers is the market where Microsoft holds very strong positions and could be anything but nice.
At the same time Mozilla comes up with a pretty embarrassing idea suggesting that Firefox users make a New Year’s resolution to convert their friends to Firefox as well to help the team distribute the browser. And while I myself am a huge Firefox fan, this particular suggestion sounded a little too rude for me as asking your users to help with your growth is one thing but suggesting a whole New Year’s resolution for that is a little too much. And when you compare it to Microsoft giving users the opportunity to avoid installation of the latest iteration of its browser, the contrast is obviously here – and Microsoft looks nicer in this particular situation. For a change maybe?
