Microsoft's decision to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows was "the most bone-headed business decision in Microsoft's history" and continues to contribute to IE's declining market share, according to Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho.
In a recent blog post, Vembu cited data from Statcounter that shows IE has lost 11.4 points of market share since March and now accounts for just 54.4 percent of the market. Vembu's argument is that by tying IE to Windows to squeeze Netscape out of the market in last decade's browser wars, Microsoft crippled its ability to develop IE at the speed necessary to keep up with the rest of the market.
"In a nutshell, operating systems necessarily move slowly, while browsers have to move fast, because the underlying technologies and standards (HTML, CSS, Javascript, mobile displays) are all evolving rapidly," Vembu wrote. "Microsoft aimed the gun at Netscape, and shot itself in the foot."
As a SaaS provider that delivers applications over the Web, Zoho has no choice but to test its wares using IE, but Zoho employees are so reluctant to use IE that Vembu says he's had to declare mandatory "IE testing days."
Vembu also brought karma into a Microsoft-related discussion for the second time in as many months. Last month, Vembu said he believes Microsoft's spotty track record of adhering to open standards has engendered a level of distrust in the industry that overshadows its innovations.
"Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything," Vembu wrote in the blog post.
Vembu may not agree with Microsoft's business decisions, but his company is banking on the continued success of Microsoft's wildly popular Office SharePoint Server platform. Last month, Zoho rolled out Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, an add-on that lets SharePoint users view, edit and create Microsoft Office documents through a Web browser.
