In a surprising move, Google announced this weekend that it would limit usability on it’s product when accessed by Internet Explorer 6.

Doing the occasional webdesign myself I know how difficult it can be to be cross compatible between browsers so from that standpoint I applaud Google’s being evil on Microsoft’s IE 6. There’s some more to it though.

A lot of IE 6 users do not really use IE 6 by choice as most of these users are typically businesses that have developed applications that require IE 6. So it’s not always as simple as just switching an old browser version out and switching a new one in as a lot of these applications will actually stop functioning properly. In a way this is a typical case of vendor lock-in, except not in a way the term is typically used. typically the term gets used to indicate an intention of a vendor to make clients depending on their product. In this case even Microsoft itself recommends upgrading to newer versions of it’s browser.

This just goes to show that vendor lock-in, intended or unintended, is something that both vendors and customers should prevent from happening.