macnn/electronista

07/31/2007, 9:45am, EDT

Tuesday, July 31st

Internet Explorer beats iPod in tech poll

Internet Explorer is the most influential technology of the past quarter-century, according to a new CompTIA study of IT pros. The firm says that a full two-thirds of all results nominated the Microsoft web browser for the top spot, eclipsing the second place Microsoft Word, which obtained 56 percent. Notably, virtually all of the top five was dominated by Microsoft products, according to the survey; only Apple's iPod was able to crack the upper ranks of the poll, tying with Excel at 49 percent and falling just behind Windows 95, which reached 50 percent.

Exact reasons were not given for IE's popularity in the list, though the browser is commonly credited with taking over from Netscape Navigator (which reached ninth place at 31 percent) as the de facto basis for web browsing and growing use of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward.

Other top ten products included the BlackBerry messenger (39 percent), Adobe's Photoshop visual editor (35 percent), McAfee VirusScan (32 percent), and the original PalmPilot (31 percent), which helped pioneer the PDA and ultimately the smartphone. Most of the products on the list were chosen because they were the first in their class or the first to make a particular service extremely popular, CompTIA noted.

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Shows nothing more than
0
07/31, 10:09am, EDT
how far Microsoft has their claws into IT professionals. IE offers nothing revolutionary when compared to something like NCSA Mosaic which is more intimately tied into the creation of the web than IE. IE added nothing except perhaps another reason why Microsoft is seen as a monopoly.

Even the iPod and iTMS changed the music business in ways that no other competitor has been able to.
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VirusScan?
0
07/31, 10:12am, EDT
I can understand the others, even if they wouldn't be my choices. But McAfee VirusScan? WTF?
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Start your copiers
0
07/31, 10:15am, EDT
A study of people who owe their careers to shitty M$ products shows that they consider M$ products to be influential. How surprising. Internet Exploder, Word, Excel, Win95, all inferior copies of earlier products. That's all M$ can do.
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Shocking
0
07/31, 10:26am, EDT
"study of IT pros." I would be willing to bet a study of consumers would show different results. Shocking that (MS) IT Pros wouldn't find the iPod to be influential. Most of my fellow IT Pros are still Apple/Mac bigots. Why would they 'support' stuff that would negatively impact their jobs?
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shows their ignorance
0
07/31, 10:27am, EDT
IMO it just shows how ignorant that group are as a whole ("IT Professionals", that is).

The past quarter century, given that this is 2007, runs from what, 1982. The Mac really should be at the top slot in that list, as its release in 1984 heralded the introduction of WYSIWYG, the WIMP and the mouse to the computers in homes and offices everywhere.

I actually can't think of anything that had a greater influence on the way we use computers, and I'm not saying that because I like Macs either. I'd be of the same opinion as a user of Windows, GEM, X11 or any other window system.
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huh?!
0
07/31, 10:28am, EDT
CompTIA is a respectable organization...

which makes this poll especially bizarre. NONE!! of those products are influential. They may be dominant. They may be useful. But none of them influenced other products (they all copied other, ground-breaking products) or created new industries (like TCP/IP, email, the Newton, iTunes, etc).

Strange.
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Sad, very sad
0
07/31, 10:29am, EDT
This is just sad, very sad. The most influential product that turns out to be one of the most WORST products on the market. Collects, attracts viruses, trojans, hackers, worms, garbage, EVERYTHING. Ok they name the WORST most influential product on the list.

The iPod is the best outstanding most influential product that people can actually say they enjoy using.
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IE... are you kidding!
0
07/31, 10:32am, EDT
As a piece of software -IE was, and is a piece of crap. Buggy, insecure and unable to render standard HTML and CSS correctly. This is why IT 'Professionals' should stay away from web development.
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ho's
0
07/31, 10:42am, EDT
what a bunch of Microsoft whores. As stated by others, IE is a piece of crap. You code your site to W3C specs and then you have to mollycoddle four different flavors of IE - 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 - in order to get it to show correctly. PNG image? Yeah you can use that... if you use some javascript to enable an alpha filter... but it won't work with IE5.0!

what a fucking joke.
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It's Simple
0
07/31, 10:53am, EDT
The reason why these "IT Professionals" love these products so much, is because they are singlehandedly responsible for why most of these fools still hold IT jobs today.

If the Mac were in the same position today that Windows is, half or more of their jobs wouldn't even be necessary because Macs don't require as much support. So of course that's why they worship Microsoft and their inferior products.
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