The forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 is pretty nifty, but should Microsoft abandon the browser altogether? John Dvorak thinks so, and puts together an excellent case:

Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.

It’s an inspired article and I think he’s right when he says:

All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.

You can read the full article – The Great Microsoft Blunder – on ABCnews.com.