I read something interesting over at the MSDN blogs at Microsoft. They are delaying the automatic push for IE 7 in Japan for more than three months.
Now here is an interesting response to the wave of anger from users inside and outside of Japan:
I just wanted let people know regarding the delay of Auto Updates for Japanese IE7. It has nothing to do with economic development in the entire Asia or technical difficulties of IE7 itself. The real reason is that, according to surveys by Microsoft, a lot of Japanese business users wanted to wait for IE7 for six months to be distributed via Auto Updates so that they could avoid possible technical conflicts between their existing systems and IE7 despite Blocker Toolkit. I mean those business users wanted some window period.
This does not mean that Japanese have to wait to download and install Japanese IE7 until April or May, 2007. Those who want to use it can manually download its final version already.
Hmm. Business users asked them to wait. I am not a MS bashing zealot or anything like that, but it would seem that the same number of North American business IT folks had the same feelings – but Microsoft ignored them. I know this for a fact since we have had a record number of downloads of our IE 7 blocking tool
Something is fishy about this. If I were the paranoid type I would start to wonder what the real motive for the automatic push of IE 7 really was. It really is starting to look like it has zero to do with security, and much more to do with getting a step ahead of FireFox.
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