Microsoft Says Buy New Windows or Be Unsafe

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. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

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