For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky. To some extent it seems that the story is going to be relevant in a few years when Chrome will presumably be more of a full-featured browser. Right now it seems a non-issue since Chrome's penetration is rather low. But this part was pretty weird:
"Mozilla performed a really good service, but you have to wonder what their relevance is going to be going forward," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent firm that tracks the company. "They keep Microsoft honest. But if Google is pushing innovation in its own browser, it can play that role."
It seems bizarre to insert a quote in from a firm whose bread is buttered by Microsoft. One would suspect that such a company would have a good sense of how Microsoft might respond to competition, but be less cognizant about the specific details of said competition. I'm not a Richard Stallman type fanatic, but it seems a no-brainer that perhaps there might be some benefit from an organization whose strength is leveraging its credibility with the open source programming community. The original "browser wars" were between Netscape and Microsoft when Netscape was still dominated by a start-up culture. The Mozilla Foundation is obviously not a conventional corporation. We really don't know what a full-blown browser war between two public corporations, a duopoly if you will, would look like. I assume that corporate competition would see predictable gains in efficiency, productivity, and continuous incremental additions to functionality. But the open source movement, or a start-up, would be more likely to "think outside the box" and take risks, and flip-paradigms. After all, the browser technology was dead in the water for years after the vanquishing of Netscape by IE. No established tech company saw any market opportunity to challenge Microsoft. The Mozilla Foundation created an opportunity by disrupting IE's de facto monopoly in what seemed like a quixotic attempt at the time. Sometimes society may profit from those who act in a manner which may not maximize their personal short-term profit.
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"No established tech company saw any market opportunity to challenge Microsoft."
Very true. It's never an established tech company that kicks Microsoft in the nuts. Techies don't play it like that.
Monopolistic situations create silly thinking in all sorts of ways.
Very true. It's never an established tech company that kicks Microsoft in the nuts. Techies don't play it like that.
the issue i think is that when a company become so large and pervasive as microsoft has in its sectors (or was) then established firms have incentives to establish relationships to the super-firm like the one that they have with gov. a company has not viable path to overthrowing gov., so it either avoids it or cooperates with it. of course many firms have very bright people who can come up with disruptive innovations, but it seems to me that once a firm has reached a particular size and "maturity" the managerial culture becomes relatively risk averse.
But the open source movement, or a start-up, would be more likely to "think outside the box" and take risks, and flip-paradigms.
That was the reigning mythology during the Tech Bubble -- it turned out that the old-timers actually knew what they were doing better than a bunch of hyperactive young 'uns.
There is such a thing as taking too many / too large risks, or assuming that the consumer has all sorts of needs and wants that they actually don't -- usually a result of projecting the nerd / programmer's personality onto the rest of the world.
Microsoft is not able to wave a magic wand and establish a monopoly wherever it wants. Every market that it's won, it has done so by offering superior products. Read Winners, Losers, and Microsoft. It never made a dent in Quicken or TurboTax, and its video game consoles have been dominated by Sony's PS2 (in the previous generation) and now by Nintendo's Wii (in the current one).
That also goes against this:
when a company become so large and pervasive as microsoft has in its sectors (or was) then established firms have incentives to establish relationships to the super-firm like the one that they have with gov.
If the worrisome conclusion of this were true, Microsoft Word would never have displaced the established WordPerfect, nor would Excel have displaced the established Lotus 1-2-3. And remember that it won majority market share with these products first in the Mac market, not the DOS or Windows markets, which means that the incentives to cooperating with the entrenched superfirm are tiny.
It's only if someone's product sucks that they blame it on how powerful the establishment is. Or to continue the government analogy: anti-establishment forces have zero trouble in leading a rebellion when the people are truly discontent (whether it'll prove successful or not). But when the government is doing a good job, people say that life is good, so leave us alone Mr. Revolutionary, and the anti-establishment forces can only get jobs organizing a handful of bratty college students.
BTW, I use Firefox. Not because I think it's better -- they seem to be rough substitutes, and I'm used to Firefox. I'm sure IE is marginally better, though.
This is one of those things you have to say, as when you're talking about how lamentable the life outcomes are for blacks and having to say, "BTW, I myself am black, so don't call me a racist."
BTW, I use Firefox. Not because I think it's better -- they seem to be rough substitutes, and I'm used to Firefox. I'm sure IE is marginally better, though.
i'll keep it polite and say that as someone who uses IE regularly for professional reasons (to test that apps work correctly in) you're wrong (probably marginally in the other direction). all you need to do is actually *use it*. sometimes theory is wrong :-) have you heard of error bars? i kind of disagree with your theory here because it's way too coarse.
Ah, but the average consumer of internet browsers is not testing apps. This is the fallacy I referred to above -- assuming that the average person is a web developer or whatever. I do use IE every once in awhile, when Firefox won't let me open large PDFs (journal articles), so I do know what it's like. As I said, they don't seem very different to the average person.
Getting back to the larger issue, here is another example that shows the "working with the big incumbent" view isn't as powerful as you'd think:
In the early-mid 1990s, Sony wanted to get into the video game business. Since 1986, Nintendo had dominated the market, although Sega made a good 2nd-place showing during the 16-bit era. Both had pre-8-bit experience, Nintendo with its Game and Watch handhelds, and Sega with its early '80s home console and arcade games. Sony had no such experience.
Sony tried to partner up with Nintendo rather than make their own system, supporting your "work with the incumbent" view. However, the relationship soon soured and Sony broke it off to develop their own console -- and the rest was history. The PlayStation crushed the N64 *and* the Sega Saturn, as well as the also-ran consoles. More, the PS2 crushed Nintendo's GameCube and the Sega Dreamcast even more handily, as well as Microsoft's Xbox.
But after 10 years of being bested by Sony, Nintendo didn't absorb itself into the new big incumbent -- it turned the tables yet again with the Wii and is once again the dominant player, while Sony languishes at the bottom.
So in the end, it doesn't matter so much to the little players if there is a big incumbent or not -- it's whether your product is superior to theirs or not.
As I said, they don't seem very different to the average person.
that's not what you said. you said you're "sure IE is marginally better". it isn't. firefox is *marginally* better (at least for your grandma who wouldn't be using many extensions). marginally enough that IE and firefox can serve as substitutes for for the average user. but IE is not marginally better (yes, you can beg to differ in your opinion, but the only thing you're sure of is your opinion :-)
the rest of your comment is interesting, but it isn't really addressing what i'm trying to get at. what i'm trying to get at is that in the fall of 1995 bill gates was telling david frost in an interview that the future of information technology was in...*interactive television*. of course MS made a major course correction and crushed netscape. as i implied above large corporations are good at producing mass market consumer products. but they're about as good at predicting the arc of future innovation as economists. not very.
in fact reading your comments i'm a little confused as to why you got the impression that you did from what i was trying to say above. but i guess i wasn't clear enough. *shrug*
p.s. readers should check out assman's post, Monopoly allows innovation to flourish to see his whole argument.
"...by disrupting IE's de facto monopoly..."
WTF??? I've been running Linux for years, and I have never even heard about IE for Linux.