Its not that Bill Gates the philanthropist & Bill Gates the Microsoft Chairman, are two different people. Nor is that he does philanthropy only through Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I’ve got a strong reason to believe that he does philanthropy through Microsoft too. If anyone follows news closely or have been doing so even for past one year, (s)he can see what I’m pointing at. 😉
Whoever said that Microsoft hasn’t done anything significant in the past year, needs to brush up on the news headlines & get an eye checkup. Ofcourse Microsoft has done pretty significant things in the past year. They are the settlements for law suits filed against Microsoft. Seems like Microsoft has found out a new way to contribute for development in the IT industry. They pay for settlements of law suits which are filed against them by rival companies. In the past year, Microsoft has paid billions of $$$ to settle the courtroom duels with Sun Microsystems, InterTrust, Time Warner’s Netscape division, etc.
James Gosling, the father of Java, mentioned Microsoft’s pay-off to Sun in his Blog & hinted that a good part of the settlement would be invested in Java development.
The latest to benefit from Microsoft’s Settlements Galore mission is Opera Software of Norway, the makers of the popular browser Opera & the donation amount, err.., the settlement amount I mean, is $12.75 million. 😀
In a news story at CNet’s News.com, it is explained that though its not confirmed by the people at Opera Software, its being guessed that the payment came from Microsoft.
All this fuss, but why? You may ask & by reading the news story at CNet’s News.com, I gather that its because Opera Software filed a law suit against Microsoft after the big M did something funny with its MSN portal, so that it locked out users accessing the website through Opera web-browser, getting the message that “server is too busy”. 😉 Now all I have to say is that Microsoft has a sense of humour but it would’ve been better had they shown something more funny to the Opera users. 😀
Microsoft is obviously too shy to comment on their supposed pay-off to Opera Software & the receiving guys are just gratefully showing their gratitude by not giving the name of the paying party or any other details but were generous enough to tell the amount of payment. 😀
I think that the payment should’ve been made to those Opera users who suffered the joke. They are the ones who suffered by being locked out of MSN. Opera just hit the paydirt for nothing. They can’t say that their business or sales were affected by it. Its too absurd & ridiculous to be true. Opera users don’t buy it just to surf MSN. They can get free & better browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7.1, FireFox 0.8, etc. anytime. 🙄
I’m with you on this payment thing to Opera. Opera Software received payment for nothing. It should’ve been the Opera users, who faced the lockout.
But things don’t work out this way. Its the companies who hit paydirt even though they lost nothing & their clients lost/faced it. Its a kind of inter-company treaty, you pay us & we’ll pay you.
How would you feel if WordPress does not let you in on firefox or whatever browser u are using? Being an Opera user I took that in offence when i was not able to access MSNBC and MSN site while using Opera. Opera suffered credibility issues. People complained that Opera had issues when it was MSN. MS owns a lot to the world. and well, nothing even come close to suggest it was Microsoft that paid Opera.
And if Microsoft thought it was funny to block Opera, why feel shy to admit it?
Sushubh, I’m not against Opera & I didn’t commented against it. Infact if you read carefully, you’ll find only sarcasm for Microsoft here.
But what I’m commenting against is that Opera users should’ve been the ones who got the bounty or atleast a part of it.
You say that Opera suffered credibility loss & people complained against it. Well, let me ask you one thing, if one or two websites doesn’t open in a browser but rest of internet is wide open, what’ll you think? Is the browser at fault or those websites that aren’t showing up? Frankly I’d think that the websites are at fault given that there’s no problem with my ISP & any sane user would also think that. So, how does Opera loose its credibility? Like I said in my post, people who buy Opera just don’t shell out $$$ just to surf MSN website(s).
And as far as admitting it is concerned, if this thing had been pulled off by any other company, like Opera Software for instance, even they wouldn’t have admitted doing it. This would be suicidal for the company’s reputation, admitting a thing like this.
1. people blame the browser not the website when it does not work.
2. people pay for the browser not the harm or inconvinience they get from using it. maybe microsoft can be sued for all teh damanges viruses and worms cause 😉
3. microsoft has commited bigger sins and admitted them than borking msn for opera users…
i still dont believe it was microsoft. 🙂
and u need to make the header image clickable. how do i go back to the home page :~
1) People who blame the browser when a website doesn’t show up, are dumb, that’s all I have to say. And this world or Internet infact, doesn’t work the way dumb people want(I may have second thoughts on this 😉 ).
2) That’s irrespective of what I said. That comes along in the package. If you buy a product(any thing tangible/intangible) & you incur some harm from using it, you are supposed to get compensation from the company that made that product. It doesn’t matter whether the company was at fault or some 3rd party. And in this case, the company itself is getting compensated by a 3rd party, so why can’t it share a part with the users? I know that giving out a portion would be outrageous since there are too many users & then there could be false claims etc. but what Opera Software can do is decrease the price of their product for users upgrading from previous versions, for the next version by some amount, as compensation.
And I’d like to hear your reasons as to why you believe it wasn’t Microsoft? I ofcourse assume that you’ve read the CNet’s News Story to which I’ve linked. 😉
As for the making the header image clickable, well, the request has been granted. 😉
The idea of a clickable header image didn’t appeal to me, I had a link to Home, my main website & a contact link in the Essential Links but it has shifted down, so its not visible without scrolling.
~~Point noted for my Template TO DO list.~~ 😉
The homepage link on essential links opens in a popup, at least here. so not good.
Regarding price of opera? They are pretty generous in that case!
a. students get a pretty decent discount.
b. in 1 year of using opera I can remember at least 6 different offers on buying opera ranging from free upgrade to +1 version to 10 dollars off to buy 1 get 1 for another OS free.
Well, I have an intuition that it is not Microsoft but who knows. 11 millions is peanuts for Microsoft. Maybe Steve Balmar was in a good mood and accidentally bought 282000 copies of Opera :p
also, most of the people who browse are dumb, u should know! u live in delhi. ever went to a cafe and met some uncle and auntie?
What would Steve Balmer do with 200,000+ copies of Opera? 😀 He’s got a much better browser in his kitty 😉 & yes, 11 million is peanuts to Microsoft, considering they’ve paid far larger amounts to settle their courtroom duels in the past 1 year.
And yes, I’ve met many uncles & aunties in cafés & yes, 90% of the time they are dumb but then, the amount of uncles & auties surfing the web is quite less compared to the not so dumb people. Oh & you can count college babes in the dumb category too but still, these people are in minority. 😉
so u believe there are more smart people online than dumb? wow…
even the people in some of the biggest firms are dumb when it comes to web standards. take our own NIIT for instance. almost a year back their website was showing BOO to Opera users just becoz some dumb developer used some dumb browser detection script and left back some dumb testing message ONLINE on the NIIT HOMEPAGE!
http://www.google.com/search?q=niit+boo
it was fixed in around 10-15 days when we the people on opera forums sent mails to the webmaster. trust me their is no shortage of dumb people. either on the developer side or on the user’s side.
Well, normal users don’t have anything to do with designing it or with web standards. Most of the users are online just to check their eMails & chat with others. So, a large chunk of total users is out. Then, a good number of people are online just to search for something or other, they don’t care about web standards, so another chunk gone.
Now, most of the surfers left are casual surfers, they are not the tech guys who know the nuts & bolts of web design & development, so they don’t care about web standards as long as the websites they want are appearing perfectly well in their browsers.
As for the NIIT goof up, well, had I been ignorant of the situations of these institutes, I’d have said that this can happen to anyone, its just trivial but I know the conditions of these institutes, be it NIIT or any other institute/company. They employ more idiots than sane & good guys. The thing I used to wonder most was how come those idiots get employed by these companies with such good pay packets & don’t get fired? 😡
Well, I’ve seen & met too many idiots employed with good perks & pay packets that I’ve stopped wondering now. 😉