Comment Articles

XP sleep

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 27 Jul 2001 21:37 BST

It's Jim Allchin we have to thank for this disclosure, which comes at the end of a strange week for daft analyst pronouncements; but even under these stressed circumstances, you have to admit that the idea is outrageous.

The next most daft thing is Allchin's announcement that he has "released to manufacture" a program called "release candidate two" which, all on its own, should be a statement worthy of an honourable mention in Surreal Times.

But for me, all that pales into mediocrity, compared with the discovery that, after all the good sense which so many have written on the subject, the Microsoft anti-trust case has, after all, had an effect.

The effect isn't going to be greeted by all as good news -- the effect is that AOL has bought advertising space on the Windows desktop. And AOL, it must be admitted, has something of an image problem with technical cognoscenti.

I myself am a fan of AOL, and use it frequently -- apart from anything else, it's the only ISP that works anywhere in the world, and which knows what phone number you need to dial; but if there's a Daily Sport of the ISP world -- a publication whose readers aren't savvy enough to pretend to read something else -- then AOL has acquired that badge.

What AOL has done this time, however, is to buy the spot on the Windows XP desktop which is normally occupied by MSN -- the Internet Portal that used to be an ISP, which used to be a rival to AOL and CompuServe.

That's a landmark. The space was never for sale before; under pressure from pundits, Microsoft did concede that it would be totally unfair to offer MSN subscriptions and nobody else's -- but then, having done that, it gradually downgraded its own service, and got less and less rigorous about upgrading what the button did.

On Compaq XP-fitted boxes, however, there will be no MSN; just AOL. It won't affect UK users much; in the UK, most machines come with FreeServe rather than any other ISP pre-loaded; but world wide, it will be quite a surprise.

Which is not to say that it will be a surprise to see Windows XP on schedule on October 25th. Microsoft has at least learned that lesson. Rather than be late, in future, it will just leave the nearly-ready modules out.

I just hope they are the modules written by the people who are sleeping in offices.

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