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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."
This is an interesting except:
... to get better terms. They could say, 'We own Netscape, and we're willing to use Internet Explorer, but if you don't give us distribution through the Windows desktop we're going to use Netscape and we're going to double its market share overnight and cause you guys lots of problems.' There's no internal goal at AOL, or at l! east when I was there, to go get browser market share.
Andreessen: Yeah, I think so. When they originally did the acquisition, the big motivation around it was to be able to have a bargaining chip
This would have never occurred to me, but it makes so much sense...
AOL hasn't been promoting Netscape the way they could have been, and they certainly seemed to have gone out of their way NOT to switch.
Now I know why...
This space left intentionally blank.
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.
Let's see, Opera is open source and Andreessen joined Netscape early. The first is totally false, the second is of secondary importance. Andreessen co-wrote Mosaic. Guess IDG reporters don't remember that. What other stupid errors can you spot?
With AOL 8.0 using a Gecko derivative you never know. Of course it helps IE a lot that it comes with M$'s OS. If only Apple saw the light and made Mozilla their default browser. I thought they were into Open Source?
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!).
Andreessen has a point - the browser is, in probably 95% of cases, practically invisible to the user these days. The average user doesn't care enough to start another browser war. And really, what good would a browser war do at this point? It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.
But the end of his article makes the most compelling argument to abandon Internet Explorer for Mozilla - form factor! I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor. It beats IE hands down - skins, tabbed browsing... and the fact that it's open source doesn't hurt my opinion of it either. It's just more friendly - and that's where you really win users. It's not how you corner a market (MS never could have done it if they were friendly), but it's how you get a cult following. Props to the Mozilla team! And don't listen to the naysayers.
------------------------------------
Spiral out... keep going.
Andreessen doesn't seem to see the big picture. The browser wars on Windows may be over, but he fails to realize that on Linux, they are just beginning. With more and more people "seeing the light," Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror will become the dominant web browsers, as MSIE is left in the dust. Perhaps if Microsoft releases an IE for Linux they can retain some market share; otherwise, we can start to say so long to an IE-centric web and hello to uniform standards.
It's also always darkest before it goes pitch black.
:)
[o]_O
I've tried occasional milestone builds over the years, and not liked them. I can't deal with using Netscape, it bugs me for some odd reason.
But 1.0 has honestly taken over as a browser for me. I very rarely use any other browsers anymore, and it has taken over, at least on my desktop, as my main browser.
This isn't for some pseudo-religious reason, this isn't zealotry, I just really really like it.
It's fast, which matters on the older machines I have in the house, and the "open in new tab" thing...
It's such a simple thing, tabbing browser windows instead of opening them in new windows...
...but it makes all the difference for me. I can't use a browser without it anymore, and it hooked me within 5 minutes of firing it up.
Great feature. If only it would detect installed plugins and use them automatically instead of forcing me to either set up all of my helper applications manually or re-install all of the plugins, it would be the perfect newbie experience.
I didn't expect to like it. But I do.
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).
you describe a common issue for people with ie 5.x and NN 4.7 installed.
.... the most standards compliant browser around. let me tell you web developers would LOVE to code to a standard and not to a browser. i think mozilla (and the next gen NN) will change the way web sites are being coded. sure the old ones will have to be updated, but that happens every 3-6 months anyway. how many sites still have "best viewed with NN 4.7 or IE 4.x" on them? those browsers have been obsolete since 2k at least. (just to point out, there are many W3C standards that IE doesn't implement correctly either, but hey, we've coded around them since that has been the defacto standard for the last 2+yrs).
;). the NN releases might be more less frequent, but i tell ya, this browser is catching on, and quickly. why? the features. users like to stop the annoying pop up windows. users like tabbed browsing. users will switch in a heartbeat for a standards compliant browser that has better features. that time to market "feature" is how users will continue to receive more and more features before the competition has beta's out.
then in enters mozilla
add on top of that features and time to market. mozilla is a rapidly developing browser. it took a while to get where it is today, but lots of that has been foundation. now it's being rapidly refined and innovated. IE just can't/won't do that. it's part of the OS after all
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.
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.
This has been tried, and it failed. You're assuming that the average consumer/user out there actually CARES about technological superiority. They don't. IE is "good enough", and it already comes installed on everything known to man, including damned internet-ready refrigerators. For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item. Netscape fought against this and look what happened to them. I'm not going to debate the legality of what MS did to Netscape because that's not the topic here, but suffice to say that I don't think there's ANYTHING Mozilla could possibly bring to the table that would reverse the current trend, unless they found a way to have it read minds and present holographic interactive representations of supermodels for your pleasure.
"Don't fight with MS on their turf/by their rules" has been tried before, and it just does not work. MS either has their turf too well covered or they change the rules (FUD, vaporware, strongarm) to destroy the competition. With but few exceptions no one has stood up to MS and won (for long). Linux is a relative exception, but only (IMHO) because there is no corporate entity behind Linux that MS can attack. Unfortunately, that very lack is what's keeping Linux from making inroads beyond the server room, at least in the minds of the executives, VP's, and Director's who sign the big checks for software purchases.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I would like to direct your attention to an answer Marc gave to a question about the MS Antitrust proceedings. For those who didn't RTFA, Loudcloud is Marc's new business...
Andreessen: Generally, Microsoft is a partner of Loudcloud, and we work really well with them at Loudcloud because we support their technology and we have a bunch of customers running on Windows. So we don't take formal positions on remedies or lawsuits.
(Bold emphasis mine)
Can you say S-E-L-L-O-U-T?
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
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.
We need to make sure people have the link to Mozilla as their signature. It should be part of their e-mail too.
photosMy Photostream
This has been tried, and it failed. You're assuming that the average consumer/user out there actually CARES about technological superiority. They don't. IE is "good enough", and it already comes installed on everything known to man, including damned internet-ready refrigerators. For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item. Netscape fought against this and look what happened to them. I'm not going to debate the legality of what MS did to Netscape because that's not the topic here, but suffice to say that I don't think there's ANYTHING Mozilla could possibly bring to the table that would reverse the current trend, unless they found a way to have it read minds and present holographic interactive representations of supermodels for your pleasure.
While I see where you are coming from, I have to disagree. Look at Quicken, for instance. Microsoft fought that piece of software with MS Money for quite a long time, tooth & nail on several occasions. And on certain fronts, MS Money was as good as Quicken. However, Quicken still maintains almost 80% of the home finance market. Despite MS's attempts at bundling MS Money with MS Works, despite their discounts on it with purchases of MS office. Quicken does one thing, and it does it extremely well, and consumers know that. They really do care if it Quicken or not.
By that same token, I think consumers will really care about their browsers. I honestly think that IE won a lot of the market share because NS4 and especially NS6 were slow & buggy. (Of course, having the browser built inot the OS helps too). MS did have the better product, but they don't anymore. If AOL goes to a Netscape browser, and the consumers find the new features, the tabbed browsing, etc., I think there is a good chance of them not wanting to go back to IE. I was just speaking to a friend of mine who uses AOL earlier tonight, and she, albeit a textbook case of an AOL user, was asking me about other browsers because she had heard about some recent security holes in IE (e.g. Gopher hole).
There is a movement growing out there, and believe it not, AOL could be the best chance we geeks have to get an Open-Source browser back into the market.
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
As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.
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.
One way to gain market share would be for a P2P Mozilla project(Sharezilla) to be started. Good file sharing software catches on quickly.
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...
That's not a problem, it's the solution. The next computer they get has Red Hat on it with KDE desktio default. As long as they can read their old work, surf, email and isntant message, they will be as happy as they ever were. As Andersen pointed out, the biggest factor is what browser comes with the computer.
The problem comes when you have people who have spent way too much time with Word docs and other little endless mazes M$ makes. Their work will be next to impossible to get out of their current computer, even into the latest and greatest M$ cruft. These people also resent it when all of their little shortcuts and lefthand clicks are replaced and they have to learn something different. These people can be helpful once they've lived through one or two M$ upgrades with all the loss of work. They learn, slowly, but they learn just like the rest of us have. Still, you have to get all thier junk out. Macros, VB, shudder.
People will be much easier to move in the future. Remember that it's only been a few years since PCs took everything over. What is it, 60% of PCs still have Windows 98 on them? What this means is that most people have never suffered a real M$ upgrade. After one of those, you can swap out everthing and make them just as happy as anyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND.
here he tells us Lindows is second rate.
here is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice.
here we have a pure flame that was moderated well.
Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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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