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Andreessen on the Browser Wars
Pauly writes "In this interview, Marc Andreessen dismisses the likelihood of a renewed browser war based on the release of Mozilla 1.0. He cites Microsoft's current monopolistic market share, and dares anyone to try and fight it."
I agree Mozilla is the /.er's dream - the public hardly knows about it. Heck, I would venture to say that there is a HUGE group that doesn't even know about Netscape anymore. Look at Opera, which is a very sound browser in it's own right - it's user base is extremely limited, and it has been out for a good number of years.
Trust me, I want to see someone make a run at M$ crap, BUT I don't see it happening. Not without an act of God.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Andreesen is wrong about a few things. MS can be combated successfully. The trick is to not play their game of proprietary software on a platform they control. No one can succeed in that territory. The trick is not to succumb to their tactics, and to stay agile and ahead of them
Well, MS does not really have a way of combating Mozilla. How are they going to undermine a free product. As long as we keep fighting the battles we can beat the Beast. It's going to take patience and a few good victories to gain momentum.
It's already happening, Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses, Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly, IBM has given Linux their papal blessing. Peru and a few other enlightened Nation-states are considering Linux. ILM and the CG market is shifting to Linux.
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
Ultimately, Linux and Mozilla will win the mindshare battle one step at a time. Let's continue to build kick ass, peer reviewed software one line at a time, and we will succeed in time. Give this time, in 3-5 years time, more victories will come.
Remember it is darkest before sun rise.
Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft had a 'monoloplistic share of the market.' It lost because IE was:
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Amazing how some 'free software' advocates tend to side with the opposite on this argument. Netscape used to cost $50 a pop back in the day.
IE got its 'monopolistic market share' before Windows 98 integration. It simply won it over by being the best. I even remember running IE 3 on lil' old slowpoke Mac LC's back in the day... cause, seriously, who the fudge wanted to pay the Netscape license fee?
Netscape 4.x did them over. I'd rather stick pins though my eyes while simultaneously having my testicles placed into a Salad Shooter than use that browser. It would crash faster than I could type this sentence.
Mark is just a whiny little pansy, cause he lost the browser war. That cock Larry Ellison would be saying the same if tomorrow Microsoft decided to say "Well, hell, we're deciding to give SQL Server away for free now, just pay for support."
"But nooooo! It's not fair!"
-- Larry Ellison, 2003
Just to show how much of an idiot he is, this comes from the Oracle 9i site:
"Unbreakable
Can't break it. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails."
Right. So the power supply on the server dies, and Milton from Office Space burns down the building, but Oracle keeps on running! Go Larry! Please, show me the car that keeps running when the f**king powertrain falls out of the hood. Puh-leeze.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...
Two seperate questions here, I think. For windows desktop users, IE is great (yeah, I know, security, but your average desktop user could care less). Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering. I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser. But as much as some hate to admit it, the browser wars don't really matter. It's a sideshow, a commodity. Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)
On the other hand, once you move to servers and/or *nix platforms, I don't see why anyone cares about Netscape or IE. You've got Opera, Lynx, Mozilla, and a half dozen others.
In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape? To be absolutely blunt, Netscape deserves to die. Face it, their products have always been too little, too late - terminally behind the technology curve, and with horrible UI bugs (which might be better than security holes, but try telling Joe Sixpack that!).
It's also always darkest before it goes pitch black.
:)
[o]_O
Which means he's pretty out of touch with the technology he helped create and also that people in general (even Mark) equate OSS with "fringe stuff". The fact that the browser is closed source doesn't matter, we'll call it "Open Source" anyway because the same lunatic fringe that supports OSS seems to kind of like it.
What are the chances people are going to be using IE 30 years from now versus something that originated from the Mozilla codebase?
As the Mozilla codebase improves in the light of public scrutiny and the IE codebase becomes older and more obscure, things will start to change. It will become cheaper and cheaper to produce a new browser implementation for a specific application based on Mozilla. At the same time, the bills for the continued development of IE will start to pile up for MS. IE will get less attention from coders. Mozilla will get more. In the long run, costs will dictate the outcome and IE will lose.
That's my prediction. Just look what happened to Linux, and look how long it took. Have patience.
Uh..Duh? How about undermining it by making their browser also free and also bundling it with the OS 95% of the world is using? How does MOZILLA combat THAT? Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense.
I won't even bother getting into the discussion of which is a better product from a Windows end-user perspective, since its an opinion. Suffice it to say, Mozilla is not demonstrably a better browser for everyone, even if it might render HTML more correctly according to the standard.
Lastly you seem to forget that Netscape was one the guy with 90%+ of the browser market, and it was, for all intents, free. Yes, they charged business customers but that's fairly insignificant as the vast majority of people (maybe 90% of the original 90%) were using it for free. So obviously Microsoft found away to combat that (see not-so-secret-strategy above).
Being Free Software has made Mozilla hundreds of times more popular than it should be. Heck, if Mozilla wasn't Free Software probably no one would be using it. For years it was hardly useable, and yet people (like me) still fired it up.
Now it is actually good, but Microsoft has all of the marketshare. The few people that are using it are almost without doubt using it because it is Free Software. Because it is Free Software, and because it is very cool, it is even being used in new projects which will undoubtedly drive its acceptance.
My guess is that in the long run it will even continue to gain converts, but this is only because it is Free. I don't personally think it would grow its userbase even if they gave it away but kept the source code. The only reason that people are interested in it is that they know that they can build on it, but that is quite likely to be enough to keep it alive and growing.
From the interview:
IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance.!
Doh!
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
"My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once."
The cool thing is that Microsoft has tried competing with Sony and Nintendo, and they are losing like crazy to Sony. Nintendo will ultimately beat Microsoft as well, giving them a little piece of long-overdue humble pie to digest for a while...
http://www.walkingtaco.com
So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today. So far as I can see, he's no more deserving of that kind of respect than any of a number of folks at Netscape. The ARE kudos that the folks at Netscape deserve, as the people at Netscape did an enormous amount to develop many of the technologies that have made the WWW what it is today -- but I don't see that Mr Andreessen deserves any more credit than anyone else.
Unfortunately,I have no knowledge of Netscape that anyone else couldn't get through the media, so these are merely the opinions of someone willing to question the popular perceptions.
I'm not trying to disparage the man, but IMHO, he's shown no particular managerial skills or any aspects of a true visionary. I expect Loudcloud to quietly burn through its VC financing, and slip beneath the waves, just another dot-com bomb.
The fact that he's so willing to accept that just because Microsoft owns the market today, they will always and forever do so, should discredit him as a man of imagination.
Just for a second, image the consequences of a hypothetical event like Homeland Security deciding to hold individual (and corporate) computer users responsible for the viruses their systems propagate, in an attempt to wake people up to responsible operation of their computers. In such a scenario, it wouldn't take more than a few highly-publicized cases of clueless PC users whose systems launch DOS attacks being prosecuted to change the dynamics of the marketplace significantly.
Change Happens -- All the Time.
No visionary expects the future to be anything like the present.
Large and bloated... It takes forever to load compared to IE
Pages take longer to load
Has annoying little UI bugs that keep popping up (ex. Typing in a new URL on the address bar occasionally causes the current page to reload, instead of going to the new page; focus doesn't always move to a field when you click on it, etc...)
Doesn't consistantly display pages correctly-I have pages that will display on my copy of Mozilla that my coworker can't get to display on his.
The average user doesn't have the slightest dea what open source means, or care about it at all unless they have been brainwashed into being as anti-Microsoft as a lot of the people on here are.
Mozilla definately has promise, and I love some of the developer tools that come with it, but I don't think the average user will put up with the many little annoyances I've found in it. It still has a LOT of work before I think it will be any sort of a threat to IE.
After Version 4.7, Netscape turned to solid crap. Yeah, it began to look better but it was slower than molassus and buggier than Aliens. Parent is right in that respect. All IE did was endure. Netscape killed itself and the other browsers were just crawling from under the rocks, still evolving into something actually worth competing with. IE won by defalt then fortified it's position by integrating it into Windows, which, contrary to popular belief is not monopolistic practice. It's their OS, their program. MS has the right to do whatever the hell they want to it; Even make it hostile to other applications. Their external business practices on the other hand...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Personally I'm finding Andreessen to be very pessimistic and trollish in vision. This is the man that once had a very ambitious vision, but it looks like the failure of his company against the Goliath of all companies has quelled his visionary persona just a tad.
"The bad news is the browser is kind of done" he says, well I hardly think so. Personally I feel the way the Internet works currently is irksome and could use a ton of tweaking. Indeed, there is only so much one can do to comply with standards, but it's taking those standards and actually doing something with it. Tabbed browsing, advanced print control, faster load times, better download support, built in anti-pop up, meta refresh notification and so much more! We must being taking the browsers beyond displaying a web page and actually providing useful information or helping the user browse more efficiently.
Ford didn't say "alright guys, you know, this car is certainly going forward, backward, left and right well enough, I don't think there's too much more we can really do...", no, he and his predecessors kept thinking up new ideas, making their cars safer, easier to handle, more fuel efficient, quieter, sleeker and so much more. He went beyond the basics of forward, backward, left and right and built a company on innovation. If Andreessen doesn't realize this then I don't think he's someone that should be heading the project to take on Microsoft.
There are many more advancements a browser could be made to do or support, we're only entering the knee of the bend here, we're starting to look up high, this isn't the time to be afraid of heights.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
But the key point here is that this is Wal*Mart we are talking about, and what this move really means is that Wal*Mart might be doing something to Microsoft that they do to every other supplier in their supply chain: squeezing every dollar out of them they can. Seriously, Wal*Mart has (I believe) quarterly meetings with all of their suppliers whose sole real purpose is to find ways to get Wal*Mart the product they want to sell more cheaply. When the product is PCs, however, the discussion pretty quickly hits the brick wall of MS licensing fees, which I don't think can ever be made cheap enough for the Behemoth from Bentonville.
It is pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Wal*Mart is exactly the kind of company that could really do serious damage to Microsoft if their market share in PCs through Wal*Mart and Sam's Club stores turns it up a notch. At some point, you will see then *insisting* that (say) HP ditch Windows on the systems they sell, and use some cheap combination of Linux, StarOffice, and a browser like Mozilla to squeeze out an extra $50 or $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple word processor thingie. And that should be the moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart. If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time retreated to the role of permanent leech on the corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not horrible businesses, but world domination will not be in the cards.
Babar
Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. If most of the masses were at that level of knowledge, ability, and comfortability with computers, Wal-Mart could have just kept on selling "naked" PCs and let the buyer both decide what to install and do the installation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today.
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy whose usage was doubling every month and generating a huge stir. I avoided it for six months in late 1993 and early 1994 having heard how cool and addictive it was, lest I further neglect my studies. It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure. (A decent account of what he did, and which elements were new, can be found at MIT's Inventor's Dimension.) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution; it's what made the Internet accessible to the masses.
Clark was a techie turned capitalist who, having failed to figure out how to take the 3D graphics technology he had pioneered at SGI and make money in the upcoming PC 3D graphics revolution (which he foresaw, but ducked: full 3D on a chip costing $20 and selling on PCs for $30-200) was looking for some new arena where he could 'win' and turned his attention to how to make a buck on this new "Mosaic" thing. He succeeded brilliantly, but as with SGI, he never figured out how to take a technology he had pioneered and turn it into a business with a defensible end-game. Clark has some business sense but I think his virtues are a lot more a shrewd sense of timing and trends than an ability to build a sustainable business. This might be too harsh on him; perhaps it was an impossible task given his "competition": the leverage of Microsoft. But the failures at SGI and Netscape were failures of business vision and strategy, his responsibility, not failures of the technology guys, Mark Andreesen (or, say, Kurt Akeley).
I'd agree with you that Jim Clark was responsible for giving Marc the name recognition that he has today... Clark did this I presume since he recognized that anyone could go build a browser, but only one company would have the "inventor of the browser" on their staff and the insight, marketing, and recruiting advantages that would bring. Without that, Marc would only be as famous as, say, Tim Berners-Lee. You've heard of him, I notice. And I'd agree that Marc Andreesen noticed the missing pieces in part because he was at the right place at the right time, developing software at a university that was a supercomputing center hooked into the physics community of Tim Berners Lee, etc. But it was Marc who saw how to turn a hypertext system for publishing physics papers and linking footnotes into a mass medium.
Marc's vision was innovative and technical and it succeeded. Jim Clark's vision was business-oriented and capitalistic (which is no crime) and it failed after making a few rich. Now who deserves accolades as the visionary?
--LinuxParanoid, who didn't have enough vision to accept that offer to attend University of Illinois in the early 90s...
Let's keep something in mind here, folks: Marc Andreessen is not a neutral party when observing the next-generation browser war. The current Netscape is based on Mozilla -- it's no longer "his" Netscape. This, I think, is the same line of thinking that got JWZ so upset about the Mozilla project. Netscape, while employing people like Andreessen and Zawinski, produced a first-generation browser that swept across the market because it was the only one there, but quickly got taken down by a company with monopoly power in the desktop market. This time around, Netscape has a better browser than Microsoft, but it's not the one they helped build. Sounds like a recipe for sour grapes to me -- or at least an apathetic attitude.
In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.
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