Deliciously Stephy

The battle between Firefox and Internet Explorer

December 3rd, 2005

I was digging a post about spread Firefox, then I saw a url to spread Internet Explorer, where there’s a post by “Bill Gates” talking about a cruel practice going on on Firefox-controlled Period Blood Island in the Indian Ocean.

http://www.spreadinternetexplorer.com/node/169#comment

According to “Bill Gates”, stray dogs were being skewered on hooks and dragged behind boats as live shark bait. Here is a picture of a six-month-old Labrador pup having a huge double hook through its snout.

Then I went on reading the comments of the story. Many people accused “Bill Gates” of posting such a story to attack his rival companies and that he tortured a dog in order to to make up the story.

I don’t know the truth.

I once hated Microsoft for its sly business strategies, and I loved Google very much! Then all of a sudden, Google became a giant in Silicon Valley that everyone’s afraid of.

Not only does it have a powerful search engine, but it has web-based email service, instant messenger, map, a user-driven video streaming community, feed reader, and online shopping services like Froogle and catelog reader.

(Go to Google Services and Tools and Google Labs, and you can find a bunch of things that are under development at Google.)

Wired has an article about this rising star: how it became a threat to big companies like Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, and even Microsoft.

All of a sudden, I had a feeling that that Google would be the next Microsoft, and people will eventually dislike it like we hate Microsoft. Why?

According to my very limited knowledge in Economics, making profit is what every company is trying to do. Well, maybe some exist for other reasons like as a political strategy to ease the tension between two countries, but I believe that the ultimate reason of their existence is to try to make a profit.

Even if there are political reasons or whatever issues involved in the practice, money is still a big interest behind the scene.

Think about what we’re doing everyday and what our countries are doing.

We may not see money as something very important, but we all want to survive and preferably, to live a better lives. That’s why we need to work. We need money.

Most conflicts between countries may seem to be something to do with humanities, but this so-called justice is simply a way for them to cover their real motives, i.e. to control natural resources that all societies need and to protect their own economies. Aren’t these all money-issues?

Google is not a charitable organization. Even though it’s making a lot of contribution to the world, it doesn’t mean that it has no intention to make money; and to make money, you want everyone to use your products.

We hate Microsoft because it always tries to dominate the world. It forces us to use only its products so that it can eliminate its competitors and maintain its position as the king of the computer world; but isn’t Google trying to do the same thing (with a view to its series of new tools and services under development)?

Maybe what is different between Microsoft and Google is that Google is more supportive to open standards.

If Google keeps its openness to open source applications and services, people probably will still love it even if it really becomes the next dominator of our world of computing and information.

Funny that we didn’t seem to hate Sony before for how it tries to make its products only supportable by other of its products. (The recent boycott is due to a different reason: the rootkit thingy on its CDs that seriously invades our privacy and the security of our computers.)

Anyway, I don’t think Google is a terrorist as spreadinternetexplorer.com claims in a post, and I don’t think Firefox has a connection to al-Qaeda as suggested on the site. These sound too ridiculous to me.

After all, we don’t know who are the people behind spreadinternetexplorer.com, like we don’t know if it’s really people from Yahoo! who are behind the prank of listing the address of Google’s headquarter in Mountain View as a fish store on the new Yahoo! Map.

Well, it’s a world of complicated relationship, and both human beings and animals become the victims of this world of gains and losses.

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