Microsoft is officially halting distribution of Internet Explorer for the Mac at the end of next month. You'll probably want to archive a copy or two now for testing purposes, as well as to use with sites like the Proximus wireless "access" point at Javapolis last week that wouldn't let anybody in unless they were using IE. This had more than a little to do with the silence of my sites over the last week, as well as the paucity of reports from what was a quite interesting show for those who were there. Poor wireless access (the IE requirement was not the only problem) meant relatively few people were able to chat about or report from the show in real time.
Putting such blatantly bad design on display in front of an audience of 2000 alpha geeks, almost every one of whom could probably explain in intimate detail exactly what Proximus did wrong, is not exactly the smartest viral marketing a company might do. In fact, that's an idea. Next year let's do a reverse keynote where the CEO and CTO of Proximus have to stand in front of the convention and listen to everyone in the audience tell them how to fix their broken system. It used to be that only internal users suffered through such brain damage and poor design; but with web apps everyone gets to see just how incompetent your team really is. Hmm, there's another idea. How about a mutual fund that makes investment decisions by analyzing a company's public web applications to figure out which companies hire the pointy-haired and which don't?
