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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.
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.)
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.
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.