Back in the early-90s I was a Mac and IRIX/TRIX user... I gave Linux a try around '94 and didn't care for it. This makes sense as IRIX and Mac OS were quite mature and intelligently design, Linux was still a dorm room toy. The late 90s had me mostly working with SunOS/Solaris, Microsoft was largely a joke... something with huge memory leaks everywhere that was used by AOL kiddies.
In 1999 Microsoft did two things that really impressed me... the first involved AOL's IM (AIM) service. The new MSN client had the capacity to communicate on the AIM networks with AOL clients. Naturally this pissed off AOL so they made defensive changes, over the course of one night AOL "fixed" their network three times, in three different ways to lock out MSN clients. Each time, within no more than a couple of hours the Microsoft tiger team had discovered and exploited a new hole to allow their MSN clients to connect. Three times AIM was compromised in this manner before the legal staffs got involved. I couldn't believe not only the speed and power of Microsoft's capabilities (to discover and exploit at will in this manner against an organization that is ACTIVELY defending itself from this specific threat in such a small window of time) but at the sheer guts of Microsoft to throw the gauntlet down in this manner.
The second thing was the release of Windows 2000, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
Several years earlier Microsoft had gone to war with Netscape... unbeknownst to me at the time, Netscape actually started the fight... by engineering its servers to reject non-Mozilla clients (which is why MSIE used to lie and claim that it was Mozilla). Microsoft won this fight too.
Later they went up against Sun, with their leased network applications. Sun introduced the concept and Microsoft effectively beat them to the market by nearly a year.
Now Google, Microsoft's latest enemy and the inspiration for this post. They are mismatched from the start... Microsoft is a technology company and Google is a media company. (despite what everyone seems to think) So what does this have to do with what? Since I last updated MSIE, advertisement links on Google no longer work. Every single one is broken... but the normal search links work just fine.
Microsoft has the resources and the balls to do, not just say, but to do anything their evil imagination (which I think we will all acknowledge as mighty impressive as far as evil imaginations go) can come up with.
cheers,
catch
Edited to add:
Not only Google ads on google.com but also google ads embedded in other pages as well. None of them work.
