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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...
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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?
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.
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Spiral out... keep going.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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 $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple word processor thingie. And that should be the moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart. If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time retreated to the role of permanent leech on the corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not horrible businesses, but world domination will not be in the cards.
Babar
here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ 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.