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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
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.
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.
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