David Hudson on Tue, 21 Apr 1998 06:30:31 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> The Browser Wars |
Those who've been following Nettime closely may remember that last Thursday, April 16, was declared the first International Browser Day, which was celebrated with gusto in Amsterdam. Of the handful of events, by far the most exhilarating was the presentation of thirty-eight (38!!) browsers designed by students from the Sandburg Instituut and the Gerrit Rietveldakademie in Amsterdam and the Hageschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht. Even though the students' presentations were limited to three minutes (there was even a gong), if you allow for the moment or two of transition and do the math, you'll realize the whole extravaganza took quite a while -- but was never, ever boring. Far from it. These young designers, who were told to go ahead and put technical feasibility low on their list of priorities and instead let their imaginations run wild, presented argument after argument for the desperate need for geeks and designers to mingle more often. The ideas were striking, fresh and literally drew ooh's and ahh's from the jury and the audience. I was asked to give a talk, a brief historical overview of the browser wars which served as a sort of intermission. For many of us, there's nothing new here, but in a few years, we'll have forgotten most or all of it, and this summary might be convenient -- or just quaint. Nonetheless, several suggested I post it, so here 'tis... -- The Browser Wars I can't remember whether it's an urban legend I picked up somewhere off the Net, or if it's a scene from a movie or a Monty Python sketch seen years ago, but someone, somewhere planted this image in my mind: In a conveniently distant southeast Asian country, two trucks have pulled over on opposite sides of the road, one red with the universally recognizable white wave gently rolling along its side, and the now officially "classic" cursive lettering spelling out "Coca-Cola"; the other, red, white and blue, featuring another variation on the wave: the Pepsi truck. The drivers, each wearing the uniform of their designated cola, have gotten out to take cover behind their trucks and are actually firing real weapons with real bullets at each other. The Cola Wars, taken to their absurd extreme. Coke and Pepsi, battling it out, street by street for territory, just like the nation states, religions, kingdoms and tribes before them. The scene is in fact so absurd that I seriously doubt it ever took place, but the Cola Wars, of course, are real. In the 80s, two books from two authors came out bearing "The Cola Wars" in their titles, and they documented the strategies and battle plans, successes and failures, and above all, the personalities driving the silly but nonetheless not inconsequential narrative. Throughout human history, the glue that has held armies together is loyalty. Soldiers are at least meant, anyway, to be motivated to put their lives on the line out of loyalty to something higher than themselves -- their king, their god, their fellow countrymen or to an abstract ideal such as democracy or 'the revolution'. At some point after the Industrial Revolution and the triumph of capitalism, another loyalty was added to the list: brand loyalty. I want to believe that that shootout in the southeast Asian country never actually happened, that humans are sane enough to realize that there's nothing behind the names and logos of Coke and Pepsi other than brown sugar water. And that when we talk about the Cola Wars, or when G. Wayne Miller writes a book called _Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies That Make Them_, we can take comfort in the fact that we're merely being sensationally metaphorical. Not to distract from the reality that real wars with real casualties and spilt blood are indeed fought for profits, but at least we pretend higher ideals are at stake. We disguise our lust for Kuwait's oil, for example, as a willingness to smart bomb the hell out of Baghdad in the name of national sovereignty. But what, then, is actually at stake in the metaphorical wars between brands and their loyalists? Not physical, geographical territory to be won street by street, bridge by bridge, of course, but: market share. And though it represents real money, market share is an intangible abstract, and so are the weapons used to win it. To win the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers, you have to create a clear perception of your product and of the company behind it. Just watch how vehemently Mattel fights for the image of Barbie to get an idea of just how vital such perceptions are. Mattel walks a thin line with Barbie, of course, trying to sell a sex object to children. But it's obviously an incredibly effective formula. Of course she's sexy, but it's a good, clean -- clean to the point of sterility -- sort of sexy, and she would never engage in the sort of acts she's depicted engaging in on more than a few Web sites out there. So Mattel will fight tooth and nail to keep the delicately balanced equation from tilting to either side, even risking the image of the company for the sake of the image of the product. Mattel has done the math. Barbie comes first, before her maker. Now, even though there are countless Web browsers out there, when we talk about the browser wars, we are, of course, talking about the battle between Netscape and Microsoft. During the middle phase of this battle in particular, the wars were strangely interesting because the situations the two companies faced were practically inverse mirrors of each other. At the starting line, Netscape had an incredibly strong product and has been struggling ever since to build up a company around it. Microsoft, of course, already had one helluva strong company, but almost missed the boat when it found itself late in the game without its own version of what just about everybody at the time thought was the killer app -- the Web browser. But let's step back and briefly review the events that led to all-out war. Back in 1993, Marc Andreessen and his team of students at the University of Illinois in Urbana cooked up Mosaic, the first fully graphical Web browser. In 1994, Andreesen, Jim Clark, and eventually, Jim Barksdale, founded the company called Netscape. Already, eyebrows were being raised across the Net. Mosaic had been free. Would future versions of Netscape be? The spirit, ideals and what was left of the reality of the separate gift economy that had flourished on the Net for years was eroding fast. It wasn't the first time a company had been founded on successful freeware, but it was certainly the biggest time. As if to punctuate the browser's crossover from a hack just for the fun of it to major Wall Street player, in 1995, Netscape launched one of the most successful initial public offerings in Net history, turning Andressen and crew into overnight millionaires. >From Wall Street to Wired, analysts were convinced that the Web was the future, and by manufacturing the window of choice onto it -- at the time, Netscape held about an 85% to 90% market share -- Netscape was perceptually synonymous with the Web. It wasn't just that anyone browsing the Web was already exposed to the throbbing "N" in the corner of their eye. Whatever page you happened to be looking at, the title bar introduced it first with "Netscape" and a colon. Hollywood producers, directors, actors and all their agents claw at each other relentlessly over first screen credits. Multimillion dollar movie deals have fallen through over such quarrels. It's about perception, and Netscape didn't have to fight anybody for it. "Netscape presents: Wired News"; "'Nettime' brought to you by Netscape"; "Netscape presents: Justin's Links to the Underground", "Free Adult Pics", "Your cousin and his dog", "Netscape presents: The world." And where was Microsoft all this time? Completely absorbed in getting Windows 95 out on time, and when they finally did, making as big a hoopla about it as possible. When that party was over, Bill Gates suddenly realized he'd been left behind. Windows 95 met with the usual not-as-good-as-the-Mac criticism, but sold reasonably well. Didn't matter. All eyes were on the Web. Web-related IPOs were popping off like the corks off champagne bottles on the Titanic, and Microsoft wasn't there. Perception was against him. Gates dashed off an internal memo, whipped his company into a frenzy to come up with some sort of Internet strategy and then, in December 1995, put on a show. What exactly was presented? Again, it didn't matter. As Gates put it himself, "I just want them to get that we're hardcore about the Internet." It worked. He'd created the perception he needed. It's interesting to note that the browser wars almost didn't happen. Back in April 1995, Netscape's Clark and Barksdale talked to Microsoft about Microsoft possibly buying a ten to twenty percent share in Netscape. One the one hand, this might not have precluded Microsoft's cooking up Internet Explorer, and on the other hand, if it had, we'd have simply skipped the wars and gone straight to the near-monopoly situation we're all so worried about now. Regardless, the wars began, and they have been ugly, and there have been many casualties. With each successive version of the companies' browsers, from the 1.0's to the 4.0's, the programs have been bigger, but hardly better. The wars have forced the companies to release versions faster and faster, and as one programmer told me, "You whip them out that fast, and that code starts to get awfully shaky." Worse, it gets bloated. The companies piled on the extras, from the email and news readers to applets and plug-ins and some strange nonsense about channels. Web designers hated most of the doodads, hated having to keep up with each successive version, hated having to design sites for two different sets of browsers, the most recent and "legacy" versions included, and hated their clients for being so damn wowed with all the bells and whistles and demanding that their sites feature the latest and the snazziest. And the users, of course, were frazzled. It could take hours on a 14.4 modem to download the latest versions, but you needed them to access half the Web, it seemed. Each little "Download Netscape 4.0 Now!" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0" button seemed like a slap in the face if you weren't yet up to snuff. Netscape in particular required oodles of RAM, too, meaning that some users -- like me -- had to run out and buy a new computer. And a new modem. In general, and still speaking of perceptions, the Web was becoming less and less the people's medium it had originally been touted as. Only a professional Web designer is considered capable of creating a site worth viewing anymore. Exceptions such as community and game sites aside, the browser wars were turning the Web into an all-but one-way medium. Meanwhile, another serious blow to the many-to-many free-for-all was brewing. Microsoft knew the early versions of its Internet Explorer were no match for Netscape's browsers, which by the way, were coming out in a confusing array of bunches named Communicator, Navigator and any combination of those with the word "Gold". So Microsoft resorted to the standby strategy of any town bully: Play dirty. Pulling its economic clout, Microsoft struck exclusive deals with content providers such as the Wall Street Journal and commercial online services such as AOL to get the Internet Explorer icon any and everywhere. It began strongarming computer manufacturers to include Internet Explorer, and Netscape asserts, to exclude Netscape. The list of dirty deeds is too long to tick off here, but by far the most serious blow to Netscape was dealt in 1996 when Microsoft let it be known that it planned to integrate its browser into Windows 98. The twist of the knife? When Microsoft started integrating in a series of releases of Windows 95. But this is when Microsoft started running into trouble. Most agree that Netscape had all along been playing the only card it had, slipping reports of Microsoft's abuses of power along to the US Justice Department. Some argue that with or without Netscape, Microsoft was behaving so blatantly, Bill Gates was destined for a run-in with Attorney General Janet Reno. The case itself may or may not have any direct legal consequences, at least for quite a while, which is too long in Web years to make much of a dent in the current re-balancing of power and market share. As with most legal processes, the case is loaded with sideshows. Microsoft says you can't separate Windows and Explorer, then goes ahead and says they'll do it themselves anyway; Larry Lessig is in, then he's out; Bill Gates stands up Ralph Nader but then goes to Washington, and so on. No immediate consequences. Except one. Perception. The monopoly accusation is beginning to stick, so much so, that Business Week's cover story last week wondered out loud whether or not it's time to break Microsoft up, as AT&T was broken up years ago. All the while, there's been some major action on the market share front. It's about half and half now, and earlier this year, Jim Barksdale was suggesting Netscape's share could fall to the 10% to 20% range. What was happening? The logic of monopoly. People aren't scared to death of being rendered incompatible, so they go with the upperdog, even if his products are inferior. For Microsoft, and certainly not for the first time, this is the upside of being perceived as a ruthless monopolist. Naturally, Barksdale added to his comments he wasn't worried; after all, 10% to 20% of a growing market is nothing to sneeze at. But his act didn't cover the reality that Netscape's profits and stock value were sinking and that he himself laid off a serious chunk of his work force earlier this year. In fact, Netscape started out in 1998 looking pretty doomed. But then the most amazing thing happened. In March, Marc Andreessen announced that it would be releasing the source code for Communicator 5.0. The move was so stunning, some labeled it an act of desperation, a sort of last gasp before dying, while others let out nearly audible whoops of glee on mailing lists across the Net. The move also made Eric Raymond an overnight net.star. Netscape readily admits sitting up and paying close attention to Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Raymond's argument essentially boils down to this: Hire a bunch of programmers to write a piece of software they may or may not care about, keep the whole project under wraps and a nifty code name until its released, and you end up with a clunky program. Release the source code, however, to a vast ocean of hackers and programmers eager write and rewrite it because they either love the idea of the program or just love hacking code, and the thing just gets better and better. More importantly, it gets more and more reliable, and this is key to Raymond's thinking. Most software is not a product at all. It's a service. That's why reliability counts more than anything, including brand loyalty, by the way. If Raymond is right, Netscape and Microsoft have been fighting the wrong war all along. Good thing they never started shooting each other. -- Postscript: From Andrew Leonard's interview with Eric Raymond in Salon: "Netscape doing this creates a window of opportunity for us to get our message into corporate boardrooms. The flip side of that is that if Netscape tanks, no one is going to listen to us for another decade." http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_14feature.html -- _________________________________________________________ David Hudson REWIRED http://www.rewired.com _________________________________________________________ --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl