Very surprising, it took quite a while until blogworld started to blog about the Microsoft/AOL-deal and Microsoft's announcement to stop development of the existing Internet Explorer in favour of forcing people to switch to Longhorn/Palladium in the foreseeable future (and also surprising, many media reports did not see a connection between those two events).
It's not just that for peanuts, AOL brought itself into a position that is likely to become very unfavourable if they don't play very smart (except they've decided to be cheap and become a Redmond lackey; with one possible exception, the deal won't make them too many friends anyway). It's not just that Microsoft uses the settlement of an anti-trust lawsuit (sic!) to forge a trust-like alliance much greater, stable and possibly powerful than what we've seen before - a bold move from an entrepreneurial point of view, a potentially horrific one from the consumer point and slightly alarming if you use your common sense.
Soon, Microsoft could have a critical mass to push (possibly hardcore) Digital Restriction Management into the market, aimed at outlawing and criminalizing customers for noones sake but for the profit of very few companies. Given that in 2003, customers cheered at the introduction of a not too opressive DRM because it came with the right label on it, it wouldn't surprise me if in 2004, customers will willingly switch to a possibly not so unopressive DRM operating system because it comes with a cool new browser.
Meanwhile, we might see a deadlock in web development and possibly hard times for Mozilla. Jeffrey Zeldman sums up why:
The announcement that Microsoft will no longer improve IE unless you buy its next OS (or subscribe to its MSN service), coupled with AOL’s announced willingness to play ball for bucks, raises slippery questions. If AOL is to use IE instead of its own Netscape browser for the next seven years, but IE will not change outside the Longhorn OS, will AOL users be stuck with IE6 until 2010? (IE6 was released in the year 2000.)
Will AOL continue to develop Mozilla/Netscape, using the cash it got from Microsoft to create a browser that is superior to the outdated one its AOL members must use? [And that's the option that would make them friends] Or will it dump Netscape at fire sale prices after having cut a deal that lowers Netscape’s value by further diminishing its market share? [IBM would make a good new home]
If AOL abandons Netscape, will Mozilla keep going? If so, will Windows users who do not upgrade to Longhorn switch to Mozilla (or Opera), or will they keep using the current version of IE6 for the foreseeable future? If they do that, will web development methods freeze? What happens to CSS3 and XHTML 2 if the bulk of web users (including AOL users) “standardize” on a year 2000 browser for the next three to seven years?
These are the questions CNET and other news organizations – and you – should be asking
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