For years Microsoft has always fought against organizations for standardizing anything. They still insist on “leading” the industry with their own ideas rather than perhaps working with other groups. Only now is Microsoft even taking a look at what the W3C has been saying since it is losing market share.

If you don’t believe me, open up any HTML 4 book and look at how Microsoft and IE have their own tags for everything and the bugs in most of it. Developers are tired of having to basically create two versions of a site to get around all the bugs of IE (and very few from FF).

They rather go with what works.

I’ve noticed that the new upgrade of IE is greatly improved and has adopted many of the Firefox features. Will it be enough to save Microsoft’s near monopoly on nearly everything computer related? Probably not, as most consumers like a variety of products from different sources, or at least the appearance of it (which is why many parent companies retain divisions over take-overs, even when they appear to compete).

Your bigger point, however, is a really important one. Upgrade fatigue is far from new - we’ve had it since DOS 3.11 or even before - but it’s becoming an increasingly vicious circle.

Developers are driven by competition, by management, by lack of marketing aforethought, by all sorts of questionably valid internal and external pressures to keep pumping out new features, new versions, new bloatware.

Meanwhile, there is a very strong clear trend among “consumer” users, the SOHO market and even, increasingly, the large corporations to skip upgrades, or even just fix on a particular standardised, relatively stable desktop environment and stop upgrading all together. There are very good economic reasons for doing this, if you’re the customer. The “hidden” costs of upgrade after upgrade after upgrade can be terribly painful.

I tend to push one of my laptops to the edge with relatively frequent upgrades and updates. It’s the one machine I might be tempted to Vista-ize, if I have the time and the energy. The main home machines - used by my family “user community” - have been stable on WinXP with Office ‘03 and Firefox 1.5 for a good while now, and I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to upgrade.

Why would I want to increase my support burden, destabilize, and force my “users” to learn a bunch of new stuff of only marginal incremental value to them?

Wherre this becomes a vicious circle, of course, is that my behaviour is far from unusual. With so many people choosing to sit back and resist the allure of the latest fancypants “must have” upgrades, software vendors face lower-than-expected revenues from their latest “game changing” new version. This, in turn, drives them to be even more manically focused on pushing the next upgrade out the door, and so the cycle repeats.

I could go on and on about this, but….um… I think I already did.

Sorry Microsoft.