A Hitch in Microsoft's Plans

Everybody seems to be predicting Microsoft Internet Explorer will put good old Netscape Navigator out to pasture, the way NN retired Mosaic. There's just a teensy problem with all of this.

Let's look at The Plan:

Have I got the scenario pretty much the way the folks in the know have laid it out?

Well, take a peek back at that third item, 'cause there's a big problem there.

First of all, let's imagine that nobody is put off by the fact that, according to the language in Microsoft's Logo program, if you put ActiveX controls on your website, then decide you don't like them, but forget to take the logo off, Microsoft can sue your butt. We know the kinder, gentler Microsoft would never do that.

But you've still got the problem that the net is divided into three camps:

Now the populations of those three groups are a little bit hard to measure because every single member of the second group posts on USENET, but I'm going to judge that (very roughly) we're talking about thousands in group 1, thousands in group 2, and millions in group 3.

It probably ought to be said that I'm firmly in group 3. And this rant is mostly against the oh-so-smart PC magazine editors who simply can't manage to think things through.

Nobody doubts that the first group, the True Fans, are going to put every ActiveWhatchamacallit on their websites that they can think of. But what's going to convince the millions that they should change their websites?

Only one thing: that Internet Explorer is cool. Not just cool, but the coolness over Netscape Navigator has got to equal or exceed Navigator's coolness over Mosaic.

Well, guess what? It isn't. As every reviewer has pointed out, MSIE is a little bit cooler than NN.

Not only that, but MSIE has some formidable negatives:

The thing that's going to foil Microsoft's plans to rule the Web (or, more realistically, the corporate Intranet) is that those plans are going to starve for lack of website fodder. The teeming millions are going to look at ActiveWhoozis and make the business and personal decisions that what they've got is good enough.

We've forgotten about one more factor in the model that all the pundits seem to have swallowed so easily: Netscape has already proven with the <FONT> tag that they're perfectly capable of appropriating Microsoft's good ideas.

Let me close with a Call to Inaction.

If you want your intranet or the Internet to become a Microsoft fishpond, start writing those ActiveX thingies. If you don't, Just Say No.

Update: oops.

Well, it's 2001, and the browser wars are over. Who'd have thought that Netscape would release a terrible browser and then, perfectly satisfied, leave it out there for eighteen months while they worked on a new browser that sucked even worse? Predicting that Netscape Communications would destroy themselves, preferring to devote their corporate energies to ceaseless whining, was far beyond my powers at the time (1996).

Anyhow, I use Opera now, having got sick and tired of slow, bloated browsers, and occasionally MSIE and Netscape, just to check on my web pages and to cope with the morons who pretend there are only two web browsers in the world (or who forget to specify text color in their CSSs).

One of my fearless predictions was right though: ActiveX controls on web pages turned out to be about as popular as cholera.

And MSIE-only websites (though it's hard to produce any other kind with Microsoft's web building tools) didn't take over the web either. There are a few, but they're pretty much restricted to the thralls and the clueless.

I also failed to predict Flash, which succeeded because the plugin and most of the Flash files are small and cool, and the marginalization of VRML, which blew it when browsers and worlds became too big. But I was right about coolness-per-byte and "cool enough" being the guiding criteria for ordinary people on the web.