Soft target
So "pragmatists love Microsoft" do they? (Second Sight, August 23). For those of us concerned with such things, Microsoft may be making the user experience slightly more palatable but they have certainly made the jobs of developers and sysadmins harder.

MS's history in server technologies is less than inspiring when you consider security flaws are plentiful in its web servers and operating systems (just check out CERT advisories at www.cert.org/advisories if you need reminding).

If that were not enough we now have to worry about its attempts to dominate just about every single field it is involved in (Windows Media is being very aggressively pushed just now). Add privacy and security concerns about the use of Passport and the related Hailstorm technologies and it hardly tallies with the rather rosy picture Mr Denton paints.

It has come to a very sad point when parts of the industry (in the US at least) seem to be relying on the release of a product that offers few real reasons to move from the present Windows 2000 baseline to dig it out of the mire. Just because "upgrade cycles" have worked before is no guarantee that it will work again.

I am a pragmatist. I like to use tools that work on platforms that are secure and efficient. I don't love Microsoft. I have to tolerate them: no more, no less.
Darren Stephens
d.stephens@dcs.hull.ac.uk

There is something wrong with your assertion that we should just give in and collaborate with Microsoft. If Microsoft had a good track record of collaboration then it would be different. Unfortunately, they don't. Microsoft is well know for doing only what is good for Microsoft.

What seems to happen the majority of the time is that a developer comes up with something new and useful, and creates a product. When MS sees there is money to be made it moves in and either buys them or destroys them.

There is no real collaboration in the sense of two parties contributing to a common goal or cause. There is very little common ground between MS and independent software developers.

Also, the courts recently found that MS has been using its monopoly position to destroy competition. It just goes to show that there hasn't exactly been a warm welcome from MS to the rest of the IT community. Also, you said that MS fails at everything outside of technology. Well, I honestly think they should not even be trying to compete in these areas. What they are really doing is cannibalising their future clients.

Just because they have failed at some of their ventures doesn't mean they won't succeed in others. When they do, who is to say it won't be your area? Who is to say that someday MS won't put you out of business?
Jeff Polaski
nrrd@earthlink.net

In what sense does Microsoft dominate the web?

Microsoft IIS web servers (not the majority, thankfully) are currently spreading the Code Red II virus around the globe - is that it?

And what of publishing HTML from Office XP? Nick Denton likes "the simplicity", but what does this really mean? Does he build websites for production purposes inside XP? No, he probably produces some poor quality HTML as a by-product of his word processing.

Shame about the bigger picture.
Gordon Joly
gordon.joly@pobox.com

Flash backs
Chris Spark's suggestion (Feedback, August 23) that the use of Flash in websites is frustrating, is inaccurate. The use of poor Flash in websites is frustrating - but that could be said about most things. If a website contains slow and/or confusing Flash, don't blame the program - blame the designer.

Any web designer worth his salt can turn out informative and beautiful websites. Have a look, the web is full of them.
Thom White
thom@twentyfiveten.co.uk

Net history
I check the stats for my website every day; in amongst the myriad unique hosts there occasionally appears "Old Style Arpanet". I have wondered what that was. Today's Online says (Ninety billion mistake, August 23) "...Roberts was placed in charge of Arpanet - the fledgling version of the internet - in 1964." Does this mean that someone, somewhere, is still using that fledgling internet, and if so, who, and why?
Leo Baxendale
lbax@waitrose.com

Window wiper
William Hudson is mistaken. MS Windows (any version) is not an "operating" system. Dave Lucas
djlucas@btinternet.com