We actually talked about Office in business school; it actually got where it is by dint of being superior software and hammering Word Perfect and Lotus 123 into the ground. And at some point, their share of the productivity app world became large enough (tipping point) where to do business, you HAVE to have Word these days, or something very close to it.
But the fact of the matter was the fact that Microsoft had a de-facto monopoly on personal computing operating systems at the time (Apple was a piddly also-ran at that point, and Linux was something that was more of a technical curiosity in 1998).
I can remember discussing it with my boss (the CIO of a small/medium sized business) in 1998- whether our “standard” browser would be Netscape or IE. Basically I advocated for Netscape- faster, and generally better overall, but with a nominal cost. I got overruled by my boss, as IE was free, and his position (which turned out to be correct) was that being free, everyone else would effectively do the same thing we were, and that in short order, websites would be written for IE primarily, with Netscape compatibility an afterthought.
Now was it part of the OS? No. But Microsoft basically used bundling it with the OS as a crowbar to get it on millions of PCs whose owners would never have considered it unless it was free, already present and good enough. That’s basically the definition of using your monopolistic power.
I will give you my POV, from someone who was actively using the Internet from just before the “browser wars” even began… I began life online it in the days of Unix based email, USENET, FTP, and Gopher, and for some time thought the whole graphic webpage thing was annoyingly slow and eye candy content for people who couldn’t be bothered to type like a human, but just wanted to move a mouse around.
Hitting a web page for static information, like a directory listing of people at a company or academic department, wasn’t all that different from getting the same information as plain text, except that it often took a lot longer to load and present, because rendering fonts and loading/displaying graphical images took a lot of CPU cycles, while plain ASCII text was very fast.
I would say using a “web browser” first began to be interesting when plug-ins became a thing, around 1995. Suddenly, there was information updating itself, instead of staying up until I reloaded it! Or highly compressed digital audio streams, like with RealPlayer, which is where Mark Cuban made his big fortune.
The main problem back then was connection speed. Except at an office or school computer with a wired ethernet connection, most people used the Internet over dial-up modems. If the plug-in got too fancy, it became unusably slow. I could get a stock price ticker or sports scores updates in a plug-in that worked well, but anything that tried to do much more quickly bogged my computer down (CPU/memory use) at the same time as the stream of data could only accommodate tiny, tiny videos, medium resolution images (low res, by today’s standards), or choppy, monaural audio.
So IE taking over from Netscape was mostly a distribution thing. Microsoft was able to win that war solely on the basis of bundling it with Windows, instead of requiring someone to go download and install a browser as an application, and there was no beating that. And they did that for the reasons cited already - to control the portal was to control the delivery.
Then, Mozilla Firefox fought back in the early 2000s. It quickly leapfrogged IE for a number of reason, the biggest I can remember being that it supported TABBING out of the box.
I can’t tell you how awesome it was to discover the use of browser tabs. I have at least 8-10 tabs on my browsers right now. Now, think about if you could only bookmark pages and flip back and forth between them. That was IE.
Yes, there was an aftermarket plug-in to IE to support tabbing as well, but most people using IE used it exactly because it was the default one in Windows, if they could find and configure and install programs they might not be using IE in the first place.
And Firefox was lighter weight and much faster than IE. Noticeably faster. And it supported plug-ins like AdBlocker, and other fun ones, that IE didn’t (until they played catchup).
When did Chrome unseat Firefox? I’d say the move for me happened when Firefox started bogging down… But more importantly, when using Google online apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Maps, etc., became a thing, and Chrome linked all of them seamlessly. Not to mention blurring the boundary between the desktop browser and mobile phone app use. And syncing my bookmarks and browser history across devices - phone, tablet, and desktop.
It’d be hard pressed for me now to move off of Chrome. I do have some friends who are doing just that, though, going back to the latest incarnation of Firefox out of privacy concerns.
I’m not 100% sure I’m parsing this question correctly, so apologies if this isn’t what you’re asking, but it’s obviously hard to speculate on the specifics of that parallel universe. But one thing that’s abundantly clear is that over time lots of software tends towards free for basic economics reasons. It only takes one person to write an open source implementation once and then you have to compete against the free version that keeps getting better. Think about all the other software that either no longer exists as commercial software at all or has a a very good open source implementation. Things we used to pay for and basically no one does any more: web browsers, email clients, operating system updates, dvd decoding, development environments, video calls…
Amazingly, even industries like AAA gaming are trending that way! It’s more profitable to give your multi-million-dollar budget game away and sell cosmetic features. Any software with a sufficiently large market trends towards free.
Right, and at that time that made sense, but now the important thing to realize is that they very likely wouldn’t have succeeded in this any way. Because they actually got the vast majority of browser share and it melted away because IE sucked. Because plenty of other companies tried plays like this and they all failed. It’s notable that Apple, which currently owns the most important computing platform in the world, also tries to do exactly this. You can only develop for iOS on Macs. But despite an empire many times larger than Microsoft’s in the 1990s, this has had at best minor effects on Mac sales.
The lesson we should learn from history is not that the antitrust action successfully chastened Microsoft’s plans on total domination, it’s that total domination is really hard, that it’s incredibly difficult to take a completely dominant position in one product and force it into another product area, and that the antitrust thing was mostly irrelevant.
I think yes. For one, there was a lot of noise about iPhones not supporting flash or applets, but it turned out it wasn’t actually a big deal and no one ever managed to ship a phone that supported that stuff well because they were crufty bad technology. And Apple added an app store because the web on an iPhone kind of sucks. It sucks less now because more sites have a version optimized for small screens, but it still kind of sucks.
Guys, can we turn “html email” to “HTMaiL”? No? OK.
Like Hillary Clinton’s email server, news and reaction to Micro$oft*'s actions in the browser market were completely overblown to the actual seriousness of the accusations. Even then I was wondering… can’t I just use IE to download another browser and use that?.. and since I could, I couldn’t figure out why people thought that bundling a browser into Windows was an antitrust violation. Lord knows I argued enough about this in 1998, but since I can’t even remember what my actual at-the-time position was**, in retrospect, the DOJ case against M$* looks pretty weak. All that effort over this. Good going, guys.
*Post 43? The first “Micro$oft” reference? Really?
**Pretty sure pro-Microsoft. I was reading Ayn Rand at the time, ladies and gents, but as to the exact nature of my arguments… who is John Galt?
It’s been 20 years since I’ve had to argue about this stuff, so I guess I have a lot of saved up stuff to say.
I’ve explained above, bundling the browser into Windows was an antitrust violation because Windows was a monopoly. If IBM had decided to bundle a browser into OS/2 (maybe they did at some point?) it would not have been an antitrust violation. Microsoft already had a history of abusing their marketplace position. They had previously run out competitors to MS-DOS, and had overtaken the leading office applications of the day in part by their own office applications getting special status from their OS. So this wasn’t just some technicality, but justified worry that they were going to do it again.
As I’ve said, the grab was for way more than just the browser, but for the entire web. Was this always doomed to fail? Possibly, but one of the big reasons it never succeeded was that as a result of the trial Microsoft began focusing on compliance with open standards and backed away from proprietary standards for web programing.
If the only way to view a web page was with IE, then it wouldn’t matter how good Mozilla or Konqueror ever became, because they would be useless for most websites.
I think the biggest thing that has changed in 20 years is the continued decline in the importance of antitrust laws, and the view that monopolies are either taken by the deserved winner, or that there is really no such thing as a monopoly. Any abuse caused by monopolies is just spoils to the winner. Quite whining and build something better. I think that the antitrust moves then were deserved, and more are called for now against other companies.
Today I do find it ironic that of the Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft group of juggernaut technology companies, Microsoft is probably the least evil (perhaps Apple is least evil, but it depends on if I’m valuing privacy (Apple) or openness (MS) that day).
People are dumb, can’t argue with that. Bundles may or may not be good, depending on what they do to competition and innovation. IBM was pretty good at bundling also.
Well, no for the basic solitaire MS included. But say other companies sold fancier versions, advertising backed or offering upgrades (MS does exactly this today) and Microsoft kept beefing up its bundled solitaire to stomp on them. That gets into being a problem, though no one would probably care and the solitaire companies would just fold up.
They’d be free, but in a monopoly situation the browsers would be used to drive users to moneymaking situations. Like the portals they desired, but if you typed a url, how about them suggesting other ones.
We’ve got an analog today in search. It is free, but Google has been able to monetize it quite well.
My problem with this is that you’re essentially damning all the “nonessential” components that ship with whichever OS is dominant to barely adequate mediocrity. Which means that, by definition, the vast majority of users will have to deal with shitty default software. Software sucks enough without adding legal restrictions on making it better. And you better hope that whichever regulator is applying the penalties agrees with you on which components are essential.
what people forget is too once bush jrs DOJ took over they pretty much softened the penalties from the trial into wrist slaps … because one reason was MS was too big to divide up …
I remember when the first browsers were whatever provider you were paying for used ie aol’s webcrawler… also people forget that net neutrality kept the browsers honest i mean if it wasn’t for that wed be subscribing to 3 or 4 web browsers to run edge google et “exclusive” sites which of course people would be paying to be listed as
I think this is an astute observation, and I agree that my thinking has changed in some ways along those lines. But the nuance is not quite right.
It’s not that I don’t think that there’s such a thing as a monopoly, or that monopoly spoils are deserved. It’s that I think that monopolies are a lot harder to maintain in such a fast-changing environment and that many of the proposed solutions make most people’s lives worse. I’m 100% on board with saying that Microsoft shouldn’t be able to prevent OEMs from pre-loading software that competes with them. But when people start saying that Microsoft shouldn’t be able to make and distribute free software (or maybe that they can only make and give away software that is bad enough that it doesn’t really compete)… that sounds horrible. That’s right down the path of saying Amazon shouldn’t be able to offer free shipping because it’s unfair competition with local stores, or that machine looms are unfair competition to hand weavers.
The fact that software has zero marginal cost is a tremendous boon to humanity, and forcing even large companies to not give away things for free is a solution worse than the problem its attempting to address.
You could at one point. IE is no longer listed with programs that can be uninstalled.
I think it was uninstallable after the legal argument mentioned above, that IE was part of the OS.
Strictly speaking, webpages certainly send cookies along with all the other headers, but a webpage can’t store cookies on your computer. A webpage is just a bunch of data and variables. Browsers are what actually stores the cookies on your computer, and retrieves them later to send back to the webpage.
The most benign uses of cookies are things like tokens to keep you logged in or a shopping cart ID. They are needed because many people/computers usually share a single IP address, like your home Wifi probably shows up as a single IP to the Internet. So cookies are needed to identify your computer/browser and differentiate it from other computers/browsers in the house or local network. Sometimes a local network can be an entire campus or neighborhood.
As noted above, Google is one of the worse offenders for putting cookies on your system. And Chrome is something that Google wrote.
As you say, you can configure which cookies get allowed by a browser… but when we are talking Chrome, you’re basically saying “I’m going to ask Google to block Google’s cookies” Because Chrome is Google. And Google gave up the “Don’t be evil” mantra many many years ago.
Do you trust Google? Did you trust the cigarette manufacturers to give good data on cigarette safety, or the oil & gas companies to give good information on global warming? Granted, advertising cookies aren’t quite as bad as lung cancer… probably.
Just to clarify - cookies are an interaction between the website and the browser. The web site says “store this piece of information with this name associated my site” to the browser, and the browser says “Ok”, then later the web site says “Hey, that piece of information I asked you to store? What was it again?” and the browser says “Here you go!”
And at this level, cookies are one of the most innocuous things a browser can do.
But google has woven itself through the warp and weft of the internet.
Remember the early web pages that had “X many people visited” somewhere? Google saw that, and created a script that the web site could use that would not only count web page hits, but web site that the page hits came from, and the IP address (so, approximate physical location), and other information that you might be able to get as a web site programmer, or not. And they can provide it back to your web site in a nice neat package, so you don’t have to do the math on the Chrome vs. Netscape stats, they’ll give it to you. And while your web site is finding out that most people come to your site by searching for “Widget xyz”, google is storing that I looked for widget xyz. And maybe another company thinks that if I am looking for widget xyz, I might also be interested in gadget abc, so they pay google to show ads to me for that.
I’d lay odds that nearly every commercial web page out there is using that snippet of code.
Here’s an interesting thing that no one who isn’t actively writing web pages would even see. I write software that runs on the web. Our front end makes heavy use of a framework that was written by people at Google. From a developer standpoint, it’s lovely. It takes care of a lot of the work that would normally have to be hand-coded over and over again. And right now, it’s very innocent. But at this point, if for some reason we had to take it out… we’d be screwed.
While this isn’t impossible, there are a lot of security researchers paying attention to Chrome and to the web in general. It would be challenging to not have someone notice that the cookie setting didn’t change the amount of data you were sending out.
And, honestly, Google probably doesn’t need to cheat on this. They have so many other ways to slurp up data that are nearly as good.
Google is currently claiming that the next release of Chrome will start to reject the majority of cookies used by advertisers. This sounds very altruistic, but in all likelihood it is the opposite. Cookies are very old school, and how Google’s competitors track users. There are many other ways to track you than to use cookies, and you can be sure Google has a vastly more sophisticated understanding how to corral targeted adverts.
This is a more subtle version of exactly where we came in. Ownership of the browser allows activities that skew the market for profitable activities. Killing cookies makes Google’s own brand of market intelligence more valuable. And that is where the serious money is. It isn’t as overt as what was feared with MS’s bid for browser domination, and one with fewer ramifications for mere users.
Still the sniping continues. Search remains a big ticket item, just this week we find that Office 365 Pro Plus installation will overwrite the default search engine in Chrome to use Bing. Zapping Firefox is apparently coming soon.
In some ways the browser wars have never stopped. What happened is that the battles settled on those parts of browser operation that were linked to the most important aspects of control. MS understood in a dim way that control was important, but they never quite worked out what that control could do for them. They still had the mindset of tithing the Internet. It was Google that realised that productising the users was the real game.
Allowing a monopoly ensures that this stuff will be mediocre, since there is no reason for the monopolist to spend a lot of money to improve things that won’t affect sales. (I used to work for the Bell System - I know about this.)
Small companies could hope against hope that they could make some money innovating, but it didn’t work well. If the stuff they did was too complicated to be copied (or protected in some way) the monopolist could buy them and they’d still make money.
Buying up startups is how the EDA industry works, since the software is complex enough that the big companies would have a hard to reproducing it.
Today innovation gets funded by app stores (which are controlled by the owners of the OS) and advertising, and shareware maybe. These alternatives weren’t available back then.
I mean, there’s no reason for any business to spend a lot of money to improve things that won’t affect sales. But I get what you’re saying: monopolists don’t have to care about a lot of things because no one can effectively compete on many fronts.
But: that’s also not supported by the reality of my experience with most technology. Microsoft released better desktop OSes with more features and lots of improvements for decades in the midst of their monopoly. Apple arguably has some kind of cell phone monopoly (depending on how you define it) and basically has a 100% lock on smart watches at the moment, but every year they make new better ones, measured by hundreds of metrics.
The whole idea of an OS-maker replicating a product and giving it away as almost an afterthought part of the OS is improving things for everyone who buys the OS.
Microsoft used to say that the fiercest competitor they had when releasing a new operating system was the old operating system. People saw no need to upgrade. Also, it is not clear they ever made any money with the base OS. What is was was the eco-system onto which the money making products were based. People who got a base PC with a pre-installed Windows, and never bought Office were probably a loss to them. It was the upgrade cycle for Office that brought in money. The lock in effect where if you didn’t upgrade you would find yourself unable to usefully exchange documents with other users. And in business this was a major issue. MS made the lions share of their money in corporate and government contracts. Home use is minor in comparison.
Upgrades to OS functionality is important in the corporate markets, as the OS vehicle for a lot of the cross application integration, centralised support and control, etc., that those markets want. Right now it is cloud integration that is the buzz word of the week.
Mere home users really see little of what is happening under the covers.
Tabs were why I immediately abandoned all other browsers in favor of Firefox. (except for certain sites that required IE) I abandoned Firefox in the early twenty-teens because it had become unbearably slow to load and was a resource hog. They’ve since fixed whatever was causing that, so I alternately use Firefox or Chrome now, depending on my mood.