Killing innovation

What is with Internet Explorer? I personally don’t use it, but one of my tasks this week is to get RPG Radio’s website off the ground. It is the home for podcast my company Pivot Entertainment is producing. So I do a simple logo as PNG file with transparency an overlay it against the background. Viewed on FireFox and Opera it looks good. Viewed on Internet Explorer… it looks messed up. The areas that are supposed to be transparent are not; the area is white.

I find it disturbing that so many people still use Internet Explorer. It was the best when it hit the street in 1999. Killed Netscape that was standing still in innovation. Then when Microsoft won, they stopped innovating. PNG is a good example: the format was release in 2000. After five years the best Microsoft can do is implement it to say they do… but they don’t bother to make it work properly? PNG & JPEG2000 are the next generation graphics formats, made to replace the aging GIF and JPEG images. They create images that are much better than the older formats and are smaller as well. This means better-looking web images that load faster. What up Microsoft?

Microsoft has a history of killing competition by making an awesome product and giving it away cheap. When the product has no competition it becomes stagnant until it trails the competition but remains the standard because it was so entrenched in the market place. When they do have competition they go back and update to keep the competition at bay, then its back to sitting on their hands. MS-DOS was stagnant until DR-DOS came to compete; Microsoft Office has stood still for years after killing WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, but now they are making Office 12 more innovative because of the competition from the free OpenOffice suite. Now they have previewed the new Internet Explorer with everything that FireFox has had for a year.

At least then it will make my PNG file look right. Five years too late.