Håkon Wium Lie, the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software posted an Open Letter Yesterday talking about a formal antitrust complaint in the EU against Microsoft over the Internet Explorer browser.

Eric Meyer posted a response to it titled Bad Timing. This started as a comment to that post.

But not if developing the browser becomes more of a liability than just walking away from it altogether.

They can't do that, you say? Oh, but they can, and at a corporate level would probably love nothing more than to do so. With Silverlight, there's the opportunity to create browser-like internet applications that support no open standards, answer to no external specifications. The IE team would likely disagree strongly with such a course, but cut funding to the team and there's little they can do to change it. If you think web development is horrible now, how about a future where there literally are entirely different browsers to support? Or a future where the open web is largely shriveled and dead thanks to wide-scale abandonment by the Windows community?

Do you [Eric] really believe Microsoft Windows is singlehandedly significant enough that if Microsoft stopped bundling a web browser, the web would die? We have bigger problems with Microsoft than Opera's complaining about if that's true. I guess we don't know, but I really hope it isn't.

I think its true IE7 has done a lot of good for web developers. But I think Opera's got it right- only by forcing IE7 to be compliant will other compliant browsers have a chance.

Think about the aggregate resources we spend on making sites work in IE. Would we (_in aggregate_) spend the same amount on making sites work as well in Opera?

Why would we if Opera is only contributing 10% of what IE does? Logically, we would only spend 10% of the resources. THIS is why standards exist.

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I think what Opera doing is great. Standards are the neutral ground the web is based on. Now more than ever we need Microsoft to commit to supporting any and all standards established (now and in the future) if they wish to bundle a web browser. Bundling a half assed web browser and calling it as such can only hurt the web. It degrades its value for sure, and has potential of fracturing it.

Mac 1.0

Windows 1.0

CSS Suxx

I was reading Idea for Startups by Paul Graham again - and I'm not sure I agree with him.

Are good startup ideas really not worth much? Are they really that easy to get? He says that people just don't bother generating ideas, but I'm not sure thats true. People (not just those who know what Semantic Web means) are always trying to find an edge, find that one idea that will make it for them. Its probably notable that most people will generally not act upon it. But they are trying to generate ideas irrespectively.

And a few of my friends are always up to discussing their ideas. I'm usually the skeptic - maybe a filter of sorts for them. But I get to hear a lot of already-done, too-large-for-a-startup or very-tiny-niche ideas. Well, most of them fall under one of those. A lot of good ideas unfortunately fall into the second category, and some that I would personally wouldn't mind working on fall into the third.

I think he's right that a startup idea itself is not worth a million dollars. But the fact that there is no market for it is not something that proves that. A question, (not from personal experience) - why do venture capitalists not sign NDAs? If its not the idea they're after, should they not care and just sign the damn thing?

Its obvious, an idea with good execution/implementation is where you generate tangible value. But neither of those alone will give you value.