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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

...and congratulations to all those who used Microsoft development tools to build such wonderful application that cannot be made to work on anything but a specific version of IE...

I hope they now know how bad is the taste of vendor lock-in.

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So you chastise other programmers for writing business applications for the dominant operating system, using a framework that allowed OS-level integration that was in no way available at the time (and in many ways still isn't)?

You're right, they should have just looked 10 years into the future and started writing full web apps using open technologies. Except that would have cost orders of magnitude more than everything they've had to pay in IE6 support costs up to now, because they would have had to invent them all.

It's easy to judge the past from the perspective of the present.

No, they should've looked ten years into the past and seen this is what Microsoft does: They get you to write software on their platform and then they fuck you.

Actually, it was pretty obvious that although Microsoft Windows was the dominant OS of the time, it would not be in that position forever. You have to plan your software in a way it's easy to port it to whatever you will be running.

You know... There was a time OS/2 was the future.

Also, they could keep their apps modular (unlike what the Visual Studio code generators would give you) so that you could strip the IE-only part when required. Prefering Java over ActiveX and JavaScript over VBScript would also help a lot.

Good morning, Microsoft employees...

Your post seems to suggest that open web standards have only recently been developed. You do realize that even 10 years ago there were open, cross-browser standards? Granted, they were more primitive, but it was still perfectly possible to write web apps in them.

Thank you! :)

But our apps work on other browsers as well...:P

Then the congratulations are not for you ;-)

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