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"Had Netscape had an OS, it might have survived the Microsoft onslaught." WTF?

yllus

yllus

Elite Member & Lifer
I'm a regular reader of the Harvard Business Review, and for the most part they put up quality, interesting articles (even if I personally think too much of them are management fluff). A sentence in a blog post there today startled me with how ridiculous it was. So is it just me, or is this insane? (See bolded below.)

Secure Your Flanks, Protect Your Business

In Operation Desert Storm, more than 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait, fixed themselves into strategic positions — in front lines — to combat U.S. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-led Allied Forces. They ignored one of the basic rules of defensive warfare — secure the flanks. They lost. Military legends like Napoleon, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar have used flanking maneuvers — surrounding opposing force from two or more directions, thereby reducing its ability to defend itself. There is a lesson here for business.

When Netscape Navigator imagined the disruption of Microsoft Windows, it forgot that its web browser was an add-on on the operating system. Eventually Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and outflanked it by eliminating the market for a paid browser. The flanking maneuver was not IE; rather, Microsoft attacked Netscape by bundling its browser into Windows. Had Netscape had an OS, it might have survived the Microsoft onslaught.
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Netscape didn't lose because they didn't see the maneuver coming. They lost because they were a relatively small upstart going up against a leviathan, even if that leviathan took a while to join the fight.
 
You could what if all day long. Sure, another O/S could have challenged MS in the early days, but they didn't. Free will almost always beat paying money, unless you have compelling features tht are worth paying for.
 
yllus said:
The flanking maneuver was not IE; rather, Microsoft attacked Netscape by bundling its browser into Windows. Had Netscape had an OS, it might have survived the Microsoft onslaught.
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Well that's funny, because Netscape was trying to be an OS.

http://news.cnet.com/Netscape-will-do-battle-for-desktops/2100-1023_3-221413.html

The strategy, revealed to CNET yesterday by Netscape vice president of technology Marc Andreessen, includes plans to develop a new version of its Web browser that will merge the capabilities of Navigator into a wide range of PC and non-PC operating systems. ...


Within the next two weeks, Netscape will also detail its plan to embrace non-PC platforms where Microsoft has no real tangible advantage at this point, such as network computers, set-top boxes, and personal digital assistants.



Netscape is developing a new version of its browser for release in the next six to 12 months, much like Microsoft is with its Explorer 4.0. The new Navigator will effectively erase the difference between viewing information on the Web and on a local PC hard disk, Andreessen said.



Both Internet Explorer 4.0 and the future version of Navigator could radically expand the reach and impact of Web browsers by allowing users to navigate through local files and folders as a series of hyperlinks, search for data through HTML forms, and run multimedia files. Although Navigator and Internet Explorer users will still be able to view PC data through the traditional file managers of Windows, Macintosh, or other platforms, both companies plan to make Web browsers the predominant interface for users working on a PC. ...



But with some industry observers already predicting that Microsoft will severely erode Navigator's dominance of the browser market, Netscape wants to spread the word quickly that not only is it releasing its own updated version of its browser, but it is also moving to address the more serious issue of the browser-OS convergence.
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That's actually one of the reasons I stopped using Communicator. I didn't want it to take over my desktop, I just wanted it to be a freakin' browser.

​
 
Wouldn't it have had to have been an extremely popular OS...like a huge rival to Microsoft already? It's like saying the Germans would have won if they had an atom bomb...they didn't, that is kind of the whole point.

Netscape never had a chance.
 
Netscape died because it sucked. Period.

If bundling of the browser held off competitors, how did FF grow to be used to widely? FF (along with Chrome and Opera) became popular on MULTIPLE OS's despite not being bundled with any of them.
 
Pish, you know how annoying it would have been to not have a browser on a freshly installed OS? Who cares if I was stuck in 16/256 colors at horrible resolution on IE 4 or 6. I could still get to the download sites and get the rest of my drivers.
 
SagaLore said:
Well that's funny, because Netscape was trying to be an OS.

http://news.cnet.com/Netscape-will-do-battle-for-desktops/2100-1023_3-221413.html
Click to expand...

Now every browser is back to doing this. The plugin capabilities of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are amazing. I also find that Opera is the best program for printing pictures since windows picture and fax viewer crashes every single time.


Pish, you know how annoying it would have been to not have a browser on a freshly installed OS? Who cares if I was stuck in 16/256 colors at horrible resolution on IE 4 or 6. I could still get to the download sites and get the rest of my drivers.
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This. I always use IE to download Firefox and Opera for the first time. Without IE, how do I get this shit? People who go out of their way to uninstall IE are functionally retarded.
 
Possessed Freak said:
Pish, you know how annoying it would have been to not have a browser on a freshly installed OS? Who cares if I was stuck in 16/256 colors at horrible resolution on IE 4 or 6. I could still get to the download sites and get the rest of my drivers.
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There is such a thing as planning ahead. Download what browser you're going to use before and burn it to a disk, along with any drivers you may need. That is what i did. when you swap out the system, you are already set to go. most of the time I had to have modem drivers before i even could connect and why use what came on the disk, especially when newer ones were on the website.
 
Even if they had an OS, it would have been tough slogging against Microsoft. MS already had 95% of the desktop market at that point for years already.
 
Netscape was fucked, plain and simple. It had no way of fending off MS & didn't have the main revenue stream of most of today's browsers: search box kickbacks from search engines. Heh, google didn't even exist, yet.
 
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Train said:
Netscape died because it sucked. Period.

If bundling of the browser held off competitors, how did FF grow to be used to widely? FF (along with Chrome and Opera) became popular on MULTIPLE OS's despite not being bundled with any of them.
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Mozilla came from Netscape.
 
Haha wow, I haven't thought about Netscape in a looooong time. Brings back memories 😀
 
preslove said:
Netscape was fucked, plain and simple. It had no way of fending off MS & didn't have the main revenue stream of most of today's browsers: search box kickbacks from search engines. Heh, google didn't even exist, yet.
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Yep.

As an aside, we spend way too much as a society on advertising.
 
Netscape died because it charged for the browser in an enterprise environment. That is enough to kill it when Microsoft bundled the browser and attached support with the OS/IE in one.
 
dawp said:
There is such a thing as planning ahead. Download what browser you're going to use before and burn it to a disk, along with any drivers you may need. That is what i did. when you swap out the system, you are already set to go. most of the time I had to have modem drivers before i even could connect and why use what came on the disk, especially when newer ones were on the website.
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And therin lies the problem. IE won because it was bundled with Windows. Had Netscape come with an OS and made using it effortless than it would have had a much better chance.
 
Netscape deserved to die. It was a logical progression for an operating system to incorporate the ability to display web pages.

I can't believe that, decades later, the European Union ruled against Microsoft for billions of dollars.

So, if I make a calculator app and charge for it, I can SUCCESSFULLY SUE Microsoft for bundling a calculator with the operating system?
 
Ichinisan said:
So, if I make a calculator app and charge for it, I can SUCCESSFULLY SUE Microsoft for bundling a calculator with the operating system?
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This is the difference between the US and the EU. The US tries to give equal treatment to companies, which usually leads to monopolies because one company will always have some kind of advantage over the others (ie AT&T owns the telephone infrastructure, so they make the rules). The EU tries to put companies on equal footing, which often leads to weird cases of favoritism to the underdog (fining Intel billions of dollars/euros/pounds for giving discounts to vendors that do not sell AMD products).
 
joesmoke said:
now my memory may be failing me, and i was never a major tech head... but didnt netscape suck?
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Yes. iirc, it took quite a bit more memory and CPU power to operate.

Firefox is made from Netscape, and people today still think of Firefox as being bloated and slow. In speed tests, Opera and Chrome destroy Firefox in almost every measurable way. I can't post any numbers, but I think Internet Explorer still feels faster than Firefox. One of the reasons for this is how IE handles connections and data transfer. IE only keeps 2 connections going and it does not pipeline, so it loads the page in a very serial way. The top of the page loads right away and the rest of the page loads while you're still reading the top. Firefox and Opera keep a lot more connections going, so it loads the whole page at once. While tests will say IE is slow as hell, it looks very fast because the parts you can see load immediately and the rest loads after that.
 
Train said:
how did FF grow to be used to widely?
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- tabs
- addons
- IE became a security nightmare

IE only gained dominance because it was bundled with windows, and then became the de facto standard for most web developers. It took a long time for firefox to be able to compete with it in market share, even though FF was a vastly superior browser in every way.
 
her209 said:
Mozilla came from Netscape.
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Netscape came from Mozilla, as did FireFox

If it werent for the death of Netscape, FF may have never been started.

The last version of Netscape was so horrendously bad there was no choice but to kill off the product.

FF filled the void, and avoided a lot of the same mistakes.
 
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