5 ms·

Thanks for the down vote for disagreeing with your opinion. The courts took issue with bundling it with Windows. Not that it was not innovative. There was even

• SwellJoe 12y ago
  HN does not allow one to downvote replies to your own comments. I do disagree with you, in every regard, but I don't downvote over disagreement (and could not possibly downvote you in this instance). Someone else must also disagree with you.
  • nbevans 12y ago
    You don't make much sense. You disagree with me "in every regard" and yet you agree with Ken who made an almost identical point to my own. Microsoft defined the business model of the web browser market as it exists today. I.e. free, widely and easily available, and bundled with the OS. This has not changed. The court cannot prevent free market economics, but they tried to. Yes Microsoft made Netscape go bust. But Netscape were weak and short sighted. They were like squashing an ant.
    • SwellJoe 12y ago
      Ken made the point that Google and Apple behave the same way as Microsoft in the markets where they have monopoly-like dominance, and I agreed with him. In that instance, I am not talking about browsers. I am talking about the markets in which Google and Apple have monopoly-like power, and the ways they abuse that power. Browsers are a small part of that picture (though, it is telling that all three build browsers, despite their being numerous good browser options on the web...the browser clearly holds a power position on devices, and OS vendors are guarding that position jealously). Anyway, I think what the justice department went after Microsoft for was a minor part of the wrongs Microsoft committed. Bundling the browser, and effectively prohibiting computer vendors from bundling Netscape, was a nasty trick and it killed Netscape (just as Microsoft killed Lotus, WordPerfect, and numerous others, often through backroom deals to separate those companies from their customer acquisition channels). But, my concerns are less about what happened to Netscape than about what happens to consumers and the market, when consumer choice isn't what decides the outcome. IE was a proprietary overlay on the web. It was not an HTML browser, it was a Microsoft delivery platform. Having a stranglehold on the browser locked every competing OS out of the web for a decade. I switched to Linux on my desktop in 1995. But, I had to keep a Windows installation around on every desktop I ever owned in order to be able to access bank and government web sites, so I could use IE to access it. That's why IE was destructive, and that's abuse of monopoly power. And, that's why Microsoft created IE: To embrace and extend the web, to use their existing monopoly in several enterprise markets to subtly take over the new market of the web and destroy the openness that allowed competitors to thrive. And, it succeeded for a long time. For years, we were trapped in this horrible Microsoft-owned world, where the dominant browser was incompatible with every other browser and with the standards and in ways that were intimately tied to the Windows operating system. So, the courts didn't tackle the most damaging issues, unfortunately, and it took several years for the web to recover from the damage Microsoft caused.
• tkubacki 12y ago
  According to this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/business/2000/microsoft/635689.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/business/2000/microsoft/... MS was making "illegal market-splitting suggestion" and "Microsoft began to use its market power to extract exclusionary deals with many of the largest [PC manufacturers and internet service providers]", threatening Netscape customers such as Compaq that if it tried to replace the Internet Explorer icon with the Netscape Navigator icon " We can assume they've done many more bad things since their EEE attitude was proven many times (Bill Gates included - vide leaked email in antitrust case http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/... )
• TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  You want history? I'll give you history. The bottom line is that Microsoft used it's monopoly position to destroy Netscape, who -- really, let's be honest -- made "the web" a thing to begin with at all. If Microsoft would have made Internet Explorer a boxed piece of software to sit on the shelf beside Netscape Navigator, and if they had priced it similarly, and if people had voted with their wallets in IE's direction (because it was actually a better product for the money), I wouldn't have had a problem with IE taking over the world. As it was, they bundled it, and it was crap in comparison (at least to start with, and many would say up until recently), but Netscape couldn't compete with free. THAT'S what a lot of us still remember. It was a perfect, easily-visible example of a lot of business moves they have made, and for which they ultimately -- not only weren't punished -- but actually were allowed to prosper because of. THAT'S why people like me are still sore about it. They won because of BUSINESS SAVVY and LEGAL moves, not TECHNICAL MERIT, and people in the software development world (and everyone else) have paid the price for it for 20 years. (I can't get Sametime in the web version of Lotus Notes to work unless I use Internet Explorer, and in "compatibility mode", to emulate their non-standards-compliant behavior that everyone was forced to code around, as one immediate example.) All the touchy-feely "openness" they're trying to foist on the world now is going to have to be everything they hope people will interpret it as for the next THIRTY years for me to believe they really want to interoperate with the rest of the world like Linux always has.
  • scholia 12y ago
    IE was better than Netscape by about version 4/4.5, and it was more standards-compliant by IE6. The Netscape code was awful and Microsoft had two IE teams working in parallel, with the second one working to "componentize" IE and leapfrog Netscape. Which it did. Netscape always had a free version* available, so it wasn't really down to price. (*though it was usually the buggier beta version.) Otherwise, its plan was to make money on server side, and despite buying in several server companies, it failed. While Netscape was technically inferior, it is true that Netscape's own marketing and managerial mistakes contributed to its downfall. For example, you could only download it from Netscape, you couldn't customize or rebadge it, and at one point it decided to withdraw it, so you could only get it as part of a Netscape suite. All of this was suicidal when Microsoft was shipping a free IEDK and allowing computer mags and ISPs to distribute IE. Finally, in the anti-trust lawsuit, Microsoft WON the browser case 2-1 on appeal. So bundling wasn't actually illegal, as alleged. I watched all this closely at the time. It is also well documented in several books, including How The Web Was Won, Competing on Internet Time, and the great High St@kes, No Prisoners.