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Microsoft Says Buy New Windows or Be Unsafe.

CNet: Microsoft: To secure IE, upgrade to XP. Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft's IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the operating system costs $199. That, analysts say, is a steep price to pay to secure a browser that swept the market as a free, standalone product.

So much for the notion that Microsoft might ever turn over a new leaf.

A company with more than $50 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter is refusing to help its customers, despite the company's song and dance about wanting security to be the top priority. The stance is even worse when you consider that XP is basically just an upgrade of Windows 2000 -- built from the same code base, that is. There might be a small case to be made for orphaning earlier versions of Windows, which are very different code, but this is just too much.

Plenty of enterprise customers are doing just fine with Windows 2000. Microsoft's message to them is "screw you; upgrade or face the consequences." Installing Mozilla or Opera isn't sufficient, because IE components have been boiled into the OS and will be launched even if users don't want them to.

Again, we see why Microsoft should have been broken up -- and why the browser should be a separate application. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
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