I am sure that some of us remember the first 'browser war' from the mid-1990s
when the Mosaic enabled 'world wide web' became increasing popular, and the
highly popular and user friendlier Netscape Navigator broke on the
scene.
And after a bloody battle with Microsoft, which created its first
incarnations of Explorer. At first they just gave it away for free, and
then they firmly embedded it with their monopoly positioned operating system.
Netscape faded into Mozila, and was later reborn as Firefox.
And then there was Google Chrome and the Apple Safari.
With the advent of 'Windows 10' as the latest in a series of operating
systems du jour from aging Microsoft, a new browser is born called
'Edge.'
Having the pleasure of still running a couple of PCs using Microsoft 7, I
recently upgraded them to Windows 10. Before you think I am
stuck in an MS world, I have other PCs running Linux and Apple's OS X.
Microsoft is a legacy thing for certain purposes.
I have always put together high performance work stations for family and a
few friends to use, and they typically work best with Windows and Linux.
And a lot of non-tech users don't care for Linux.
My son seems to be picking up the baton on that task, since I seem these days
to have a limited distance sweet spot about 12 inches from my face for
reading the fine print and seeing the pins on the motherboard. As my
old mentor used to say, starość nie radość (old age is no joke).
But I still keep a hand in it, and help him when some of the hairier
problems creep up.
Edge is much faster and more reliable than Explorer. But that said, the
performance of Explorer had become so unreliable, slow and problematic that I
had pretty much stopped using it.
And apparently I am not alone in this. At some point bad performance
overcomes the momentum of the familiar.
The chart below shows a sample of the last thirty days traffic on my site. It
certainly is a small drop in the big ocean of the internet traffic, but with
450,000 views or so per month, (with no comment section to drive multiple
clicks) and about thirty-five or more percent of the traffic coming from
non-US sources, I think it is at least statistically significant.
And it seems that Microsoft has blown it again. After struggling with Edge
for a day or so, trying to get it to do searches on the address bar using
Google, rather than Bing, I gave up. I will not use it.
Yes it is fast. And it is obtuse, in the manner that Microsoft always seems
to take with its inward focused, non-user oriented systems engineering
choices.
It is funny how these behemoths, which one thinks can never falter, can slide
slowly but surely into failure and then a kind of oblivion.
I remember as a boy engineer how AT&T dominated communications and IBM
ruled computer processing with a big blue iron fist. AT&T went bankrupt
under a series of very bad management choices, to be reborn as a rebranded
Baby Bell, and IBM is now just a service-oriented accounting shadow of its
former expansive self.
And I can see quite a few other commercial behemoths staggering their way
down the same trail of arrogant disregard for their customers, trying
to squeeze very last dollar out of their profit stream with an inward focus
and a failure to innovate.
I was thinking the same thing today when John Thain, the former CEO of
Merrill Lynch, was speaking about another financial crisis looming today on
financial television. As he noted drily about the last crisis, hopefully the
financiers in Europe have learned not to buy things that they do not
understand. Yes, they are learning that the Wall Street Banks
and their rating agencies are not to be trusted. And that is a two
edged sword, John.
I
also noticed an article today on Bloomberg that
traders seem to be deserting the gold futures trade on the Comex.
Bloomberg attributed this to 'a lack of interest in gold.'
"As gold continues to languish near its lowest price
in five years, one element seems to be missing: traders.
Volume so far in August, already a slow time of year, has dropped about 8
percent from 2014. On Thursday, trading was about 40 percent below the 100-day
average. With fewer participants, the metal’s volatility has tumbled to the
lowest in nine months."
Yes, if you are willfully
blind to what is happening in the rest of the world, I imagine that is what
that is what it would seem to be. Especially if you consider the Comex
to be 'the gold market.'
It could certainly not be a lack of interest in trading on what has become The
Bucket Shop run by insiders for insiders, with flagrant abuse of the
market in quiet hours and obvious price manipulation.
The trade in precious metals has already moved East to more transparent,
efficient, and balanced markets. And it is not clear what could ever
make it return without a thorough and far-reaching reform of the markets and
the exchanges. Bulls make money, and bears make money. But pigs
get swept into the dustbin of history.
Oh how the mighty are fallen, and falling.