Is there anything sadder than when a giant corporation has to be a sour puss over another business doing well?

In an interview with The Guardian, Amy Barzdukas, a general manager at Microsoft in charge of the company’s Internet Explorer browser, said that the recent announcement that Firefox has reached a billion downloads was “interesting math”.  She went on to say:

As with any marketing statement, I’d encourage people to be somewhat sceptical about large number claims.  It’s an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many Internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area.

Of course the implication here is that Mozilla is lying, but as I even said in my original post on this subject:

The number obviously represents total downloads and not unique users.  Heck, I alone have probably downloaded 30 or more copies of those one billion.

Do I really need to explain this any further? The one billion downloads is quite plausible, Mozilla never said it represented the number of users.

Of course, Ms. Barzdukus had some things to say about the company continuing to support Internet Explorer 6:

Asked if IE6 provided a good experience for web browsing, Barzdukas said that “I don’t think anybody would argue that”.

Oh, really?  So, the IE 6 No More movement is a figment of my imagination?  Even I have said the browser must die, but apparently I would say using IE 6 is “a good experience”.  All that said, she said that Microsoft planned to support the product through 2014.

Excuse me while I go cry in a corner.