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It's important to note though, that Microsoft only accomplished that by bundling it with their OS (which they'd gotten to near monopoly status through a long se
by wnight 15y ago
It's important to note though, that Microsoft only accomplished that by bundling it with their OS (which they'd gotten to near monopoly status through a long series of dirty tricks). Then they tightly integrated its code to prevent removal. They attacked alternative projects at every level from PR/FUD to lawsuits. They used things like Active-X to create technology traps which they wantonly inflicted on naive customer, totally against the customer's interests. They increased lock-in at every step, making it easy to use other program's settings but hard to migrate away. Just as we hear Facebook is doing, blocking tools for reading your own data.
Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. You can export your setting easily.
They're doing something much harder, and that we rarely see. They're competing on value. If they want users to stick around they'll have to treat them as the customers.
It could, eventually, usher in a new age in software - one where you didn't just tolerate failure because it came bundled with your hardware.
- _delirium 15y ago> Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it. Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.
- jigs_up 15y agoI read on HN that + was originally titled +1.
- nostrademons 15y agoI'm not entirely sure that IE only became successful because it was bundled with the OS. In many ways, it really was the better browser. It rendered faster than Netscape, its UI was for the most part cleaner, it introduced innovations like the XHR, and it was even more standards-compliant. (Shocker I know, but does anyone remember trying to do DHTML with Layers in Netscape 4?) The reason I switched from Netscape 4 to IE5 wasn't that IE5 came with my computer (the first thing I did with a new computer was to download Netscape anyway), it was that Netscape 4 flat out hung when I tried to visit many websites. Microsoft also did all this shady stuff with bundling it into the OS because that's apparently how they operate, but I'm not actually sure this made all that much difference in winning. It certainly wasn't what won me over.
- btilly 15y agoI hate Microsoft, but there is a lot of truth to what you say. IE 4 was clearly better than Netscape 4. And IE 5 better still. Then they rested on their laurels.
- yuhong 15y agoYea, I have said before that canceling Netscape 5 (codenamed Mariner) was a mistake.
- PotatoEngineer 15y agoIE 4 was better than Netscape 4, but the average user - the vast majority of not-terribly-technical sorts - goes with whatever's on the computer to begin with. Microsoft probably could have won the browser war (albeit much later, and less completely) simply with bundling a not-quite-as-good-as-Netscape browser.
- Terretta 15y agoMsxml2.XMLHTTP FTW!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]