At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Microsoft Corporation today quietly announced the end of internal development of Internet Explorer. A spokesman said that one of the senior managers saw a car-bumper sticker which said "The only good use for Internet Explorer is to download Firefox", which prompted some soul-searching within the company.
The spokesman sheepishly admitted that Microsoft had effectively lost what has now become infamously known as "the browser wars". Declining to give his name, he said "When we originally released Internet Explorer we really just wanted to crush Netscape. We did that for a while, but now Netscape is coming back to haunt us in the form of Mozilla Firefox. Given that Firefox's market share keeps growing, we just don't know how to make it go away, leaving us with only one option."
He went on to say that the next release of Internet Explorer will contain only Mozilla's Firefox code. "At the moment we plan to release in early 2010, but considering our recent release history, that may well be delayed. We'll still brand it as Internet Explorer, by removing Mozilla Corporations trademarked images and icons, in much the same way that Debian has done with Iceweazel."
The spokesman said that "With the global downturn, we began to think of ways in which we could cut costs. Microsoft realised that having software coders on staff is really expensive, and we figured that for the amount of time and effort they expend in trying to make the current versions of Internet Explorer secure and bug-free, we could just use Mozilla's code base and get better results".
In what is possibly a large under-statement, the spokesman said that "It will require a bit of effort on the part of our customers to get legacy applications and websites to work with the new version of Internet Explorer, but we have recently subjected them to Vista and Office 2007, which has raised their pain threshold, so we think we can sneak this one in under the radar." He also stated that the currently employed software developers would be redeployed to assist customers with their migrations onto the new version.
The Mozilla Foundation issued a statment saying that they were somewhat surprised but very pleased with this, stating that it "vindicated all the hard work, both from within Mozilla and from the wider community".
More information will be made available at Press Conferences scheduled by both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation for the 1st of April.
Michelle Thomas
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