Analysis: The business case for desktop Linux

"'Microsoft has put itself into a real corner by integrating IE into Windows,' Bleasdale explains. 'Microsoft is in a really very difficult position with the problems of Internet Explorer. In fact, I think their only way out is to buy another company with a Web browser.'"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no.

Microsoft could simply fork FireFox - and wouldn't that cause a mighty hullabaloo in the FOSS community?

The showstopper here is that Microsoft can't so easily embed their traditional barbed hooks within FireFox, which is most of the point in IE existing in the first place. If they hadn't seen IE's potential as a lock-in and marketing tool, Microsoft would have just used Netscape and <BLINK> would have reigned supreme (no, I don't want to go there).

The ability to easily lock in users is the main value Microsoft sees in IE; for them the commercial angle is everything. This is why they can't easily understand FireFox. There is no commercial perspective to FireFox at all. Each advocacy team is talking past the other.

Thankfully, ordinary users can either ignore the advocacy teams altogether ("a pox on both your houses") or base their decisions on what works for them - and since FireFox was designed, written and debugged by them, more or less, it's gobbling market share like a rat in a mango crate.