Free Hosting from Microsoft: Another Ecstatic Darnit!

Today I learned that Microsoft, in an effort to kickstart their new Office Live program, is giving away a domain name registration, hosting, and email.

Let me say that again:

Microsoft is giving away something really nice. And it isn’t even something that has “hooks”–as far as I can tell, it’s just plain free.

They must be desperate.

I’d also like to point out one other thing: It does have a hook.

“To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.
• Mozilla Firefox running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox from the Firefox download page.”

Why, Microsoft? Why? I can’t get angry for not supporting a free (as in speech and beer, not as in webhosting) browser–they let you use Firefox. I can’t get angry for requiring the use of Windows–they allow Mac OS X. So why in the name of kumquats don’t they allow Linux!? I can think of no technical reasons. It’s not even like it saved them work–they wrote more code to block Linux users. It’s plain, and it’s simple: Microsoft has a vendetta against Linux (which is not news), and they will do anything to make the life of a Linux user as difficult as possible (which is usually still easier than it would’ve been on Windows ).

So now I either have to reboot into XP, a waste of time, or download User Agent Switcher, that Firefox addon that lets me pretend I’m a Windows user running IE, which is a waste of time and system resources [insert crack about XP and system resources here ]. Or I can pull my other laptop out (which only runs XP due to hard drive restraints), find a wireless card, boot it up, gnash my teeth as it deals with five years of system bloat, and then sign up with that.

So when I do sign up, I’m not going to be thinking “Aw, isn’t Microsoft nice, giving me this domain name and webspace?” I’ll be thinking “Who thought it was a good idea to put me through this?”

Well played, Microsoft, well played.