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."

Comments

Re:rapidly improving technologies? eh

[creysoft]

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

Re:rapidly improving technologies? eh

[jez9999]

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.