Microsoft Australia"s managing director, Steve Vamos, said that he did not believe IE"s market share was under threat after the recent high profile launch of Mozilla"s Firefox browser. Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the threat posed by Firefox, he does not believe the threat is real.
"I"m not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos added, users needed educating about all the features already offered by Microsoft"s browser.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said. Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft"s customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it. "I don"t agree is that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don"t have, that feature is important. It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don"t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don"t use."
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.