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Lessons from the Browser Wars
An anonymous reader writes to mention a piece on the Harvard Business School site talking about Lessons from the Browser Wars; specifically, what can be learned about first-mover advantages and the upsurge in Firefox use? From the article: "As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market."
Navigator v3 and 4 were not that great compared to IE v3 and 4.
Also, after around v4.5, Netscape didn't release a new version of the browser for about two or three years, while IE's development progressed in spades in comparison. They could have at least done some parallel development with the 4.5 code base to release 5.0 while waiting on the Mozilla team.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Until recent times,
- Boeing and the commercial aircrafts.
- any american automotive manufactuer.
Currently:Pretty much all large general gov. contracts are awarded to Haliburton or Cm3Hill.
Shortly, Boeing and LMart will merge their rocket divisions which manufactuer the EELVs. They are trying hard to prevent the gov from offering contracts to any other rocket company out there.
Nearly all power companies and comm companies have similar adv. (and are increasingly making HEAVY use of such monopolies; after all it has been shown that you can get by with it)
I would go on, but Why? There are plenty of examples.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, it didn't come from NCSA Mosaic. It came from Spyglass Mosaic - a completely different browser[1]. As for being "legally stolen" well... that's about right, but how they did it was interesting. Rather than buying the code from Spyglass, they licensed it and promised to give Spyglass a percentage of all sales of Internet Explorer. Then they gave Internet Explorer away for free. Spyglass got screwed, but couldn't complain because Microsoft was complying with the letter of the license. (Spyglass did get a quartlerly fee, but that was a drop in the bucket.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Judging from your young ID #, I'm suprised that you do not remember JVC's VHS vs Sony's Betamax.
Betamax, although had a maximum of 60 min. when first released, had superior quality video compared to JVC's (3 hours length) VHS.
Sony updated Betamax's technology to have comparable length times as VHS while maintaining greater video qualtity but VHS had already become established, causing the market demand for Betamax to decease.
What's the lesson?
"Be better than the competition" --> Sony was
"and make sure people learn that" --> Sony marketed but was too late, and also did not open its formats (open formats, firefox & w3c, sound familiar?).
Perhaps, timing, which the harvard Prof. mentions, matters as well.
Cheers.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
For Microsoft, the primary objective is to keep people using Windows. Internet Explorer is a loss leader: its purpose was to kill Netscape and steer web application development toward Microsoft technologies.
At the time, Netscape was selling servers and heading in the direction of offering primitive web applications. This was a threat because if people started developing apps for the Web, any platform that ran Netscape could connect to them, and a Linux license is a lot cheaper than a Windows license plus client access license(s) to the necessary server(s).
Netscape was essentially planning to center their business on Web 2.0. The problem is that Microsoft's giveaway of Internet Explorer was enough to keep businesses on Microsoft development platforms like ActiveX, which Netscape couldn't support. I think the developments we're seeing today in web applications would have come 10 years ago if Microsoft hadn't gotten involved.
As for Mozilla, I don't think they had a business model until Google fortuitously came along. Now, they get a chunk of the revenue of every click on a Google ad. Beyond the obvious mindshare reasons, Google's motivation is to ensure that there's a stable, cross-platform browser with the necessary functionality to enable their apps. Many people think Apple is going to begin to overtake Microsoft's dominance as the PC platform of choice. Having Firefox around is an insurance policy for Google.
It also puts Microsoft in the same place they were ten years ago - threatened by a paradigm shift that could render Windows obsolete. Unfortunately for them, there's no revenue stream to choke this time, unless MSN somehow overtakes Google in popularity.
(For most of the other browsers, their purpose seems obvious to me - Opera is just in it for the money, Safari's around so newbie Mac users can get on the Web, and other browsers are open source projects that integrate with their respective distros.)
Personally I switched from IE to opera for just this reason. Opera has the unique feature of being able to resume easily and cleanily from where it left off after a crash. IE cost me to much time by crashing just as I had found the site with free porn eh, the site with really usefull info. Opera saved me time.
For Firefox use session manager. I use both (Opera for automatic reload. Firefox: extensions and multiple windows)
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Except that IE7's standards support improvement on IE6 is VERY weak and minor. I didn't realise just how minor until I looked at this.
Fuck Microsoft. The vast majority of their work in IE7 has been to change the interface so now the browser looks as ugly (yes, ugly) as its latest Media Player, and implement tabbed browsing so some people will say "ooh, cool".
But standards-support wise, it is still Crap.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The "browser wars" are generally considered to be about 99-2002, or Netscape 2 - 4 and IE 3 - 6. After that, nothing much happened because Microsoft stopped development and Mozilla (Netscape) decided to do a complete rewrite. There were a few releases, like the original Mozilla Suite (aka Seamonkey), Netscape 6 & 7, Opera, Safari etc. but none of the managed to dent IE's market share. Basically very few people cared about browsers until firefox came along, which has also increased interest in other minority browsers.
Not the case in the USA, which accounts for 1/4 of all automobile and truck sales worldwide. Every vehicle sold comes with a stereo provided by and branded by the car maker. "Premium" stereo options offered by the factory or dealer are also branded (or re-branded) by the car maker, or in some rare cases, co-branded by the car maker and the actual stereo maker. Junkyards and aftermarket stereo installers will typically resell the used "factory" stereos for $5 or less, because they are such garbage.
In some cases (the 96-00 Taurus comes to mind) the stereo is not only branded, but integrated into the dashboard so that replacing it requires major surgery on interior of the car. Aftermarket kits are generally availiable for these cars to rearrange the dashboard to accommodate an aftermarket stereo with a minimum of fuss, though.
The grandparent's analogy is quite valid.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
Techincally Firefox is rendering it wrong. The page uses a ton of realtive font sizes [font size="+1"]. The old W3 standards in HTML 4.01 was that no font could go beyond -6 and +6. Naughty Drudge Report doesn't properly close its [font] tags and uses [font size="+7"].
IE assumes anything over +6 is only a +6. The Gecko engine just keeps increasing the size proportionally.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_font.asp
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Unfortunately, your friends at Black's Photography don't support Camino, the OS X native rewrite of Firefox from our intrepid friends at Mozilla.org
And why didn't Netscape go from PC company to PC company and work out individual arrangements to get Navigator Pre-installed on those vendor's PCs. Clearly Microsoft put in the larger amount of effort here, and deserves to be applauded for their shrewd negotiating.
"Shrewd negotiating," heh.
Netscape DID go to PC vendors and worked out some great mutually-beneficial deals with them.
And then Microsoft told these PC vendors, "You're not allowed to ship Netscape on your PCs, or else we'll raise the price you pay for Windows." In some cases, they even threatened to prohibit a PC vendor to ship its computers with Windows at all if there were deals in place with Netscape. This is all documented in the antitrust case's Findings of Fact.
Faced with this decision, there was no decision - it was unthinkable to ship a PC without Windows, and vendors had to keep their prices down to remain competitive. So they had no choice but to obey Microsoft and refuse Netscape.
The only lesson from the Browser Wars is this: you CAN NOT COMPETE against a juggernaut. Netscape had a terrific idea and went to market with it - such is the American Dream. Microsoft wanted in, and met with Netscape to say: "If you let us have the browser business on Windows, we won't bother you with the browser business on Mac and Linux." Netscape refused. So therefore Microsoft gave its browser away for free, and poured its Windows operating system revenues into the development and marketing of IE. (And they did the same to Netscape's other products, too - remember the free IIS web server, Microsoft Proxy Server, etc. etc.)
If you're a small company trying to make money, and a gargantuan company steals your idea and gives it away for free, there is simply no way to compete. Period. Yes, IE became better than Netscape was - how could it not, with all the money Microsoft was pouring into it while stealing away Netscape's customers and revenues? If Netscape can't make money, it can't improve its products at the same pace as Microsoft.
One of the Microsoft higher-ups in the antitrust suit admitted that the company's stated goal was to "cut off Netscape's air supply," and that's exactly what happened.
Sorry, but I don't buy that Netscape 4's problems were caused by Microsoft. I abandoned Netscape when version 4 came out, and I don't use Windows. IE on the Mac had better standards support, was faster than Netscape, and was less buggy.
Netscape decided to ignore standards and add more and more proprietary hacks. For instance, they didn't want to support CSS at all--they had their own proprietary JavaScript Style Sheets, and when they finally implemented CSS in Navigator 4 it was by translating it to JSSS, so if you turned off JavaScript all your CSS broke. They didn't want to support standard tables either.
Meanwhile, the Navigator code base was becoming a mess, partly because of the focus on adding more and more proprietary NSHTML and JavaScript hacks. When it became clear that web developers weren't interested in building Netscape-only sites, it was too late to go back and undo the damage and implement CSS and tables properly.
They also took the kitchen sink approach of insisting that everyone who wanted a Netscape browser also wanted a Netscape mail reader, news reader, IRC client, and so on. That might have made sense on Linux, but on the Mac there were much better alternatives everyone used (NewsWatcher, Eudora), so nobody wanted the bloat of Netscape. Microsoft did the right thing and made their browser just a browser, and offered separate news reader and IRC clients. (Which nobody wanted, so they were eventually dropped. Anyone even remember Microsoft News?)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Not at all. My point was that I don't think Opera is trying to actively compete for market share like Mozilla and Microsoft are (except possibly in their mobile phone browser). They're content to be #3 (4?) and still make money.
Spyglass licensed the NCSA Mosaic code and trademark but only ended up using the Mosaic trademark. The Spyglass Mosaic code was original. See http://biztech.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html, written by the Spyglass Mosaic project lead.
In any case, there's probably very little Mosaic code left in Internet Explorer.