MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator Message Board

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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator

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To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (18575)	4/17/1998 8:15:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	of 24154

Come on now Dan. The reason why NSCP has to give away source code is because they didn't pursue a truly modular design in the first place. Notice how IE is simply a bunch of objects which programmers can customize at will. I even have a browser integrated deeply within my valuation software. Large corporations don't want to dig through source code and they don't want their tech types wasting corporate resources doing it either. The componentized approach was the way to go. Honestly, I don't think NSCP had the resources to componentize thier browser the way MSFT did considering the pressure they were under. Of course NSCP's browser is componentized. However we did not provide a set of externalized OCX controls to get access to the components. I agree that this was a mistake... one that MSFT has made in the past and has learned how to get right, as it should after 20+ years of trying. Although I am not familiar with the details here, I suspect that part of the reason for a failure to externalize the components had as much to do with the time-to-market pressures as well as the lack of understanding the importance of doing so. Another reason is that we have been focusing on developing a cross-platform product, and since cross-platform equivalents of OCX did not exist at the time of building the product initially, this MSFT-specific extension was (unfortunately) avoided. But this is only a small part of the reason for IE's success. Without this componentization, I doubt that the picture would be that different. It is much more due to leveraging their monopoly in OSes, in several ways: some of which are legal and some which I (and many others) believe to be illegal. The one area that I do agree with you (at least partially) is that we should have given away the browser earlier than we did and focus more on eyeballs. We should have gotten contracts from tier-1 computer vendors and ISPs earlier on to bundle Netscape's browser with their computers/services for free. If we had done this, perhaps we would have more like a 70% marketshare today instead of 55-60+%. However, I do not agree that we should have always given it away, as you once asserted. We wouldn't have been able to make payroll and hire lots of people to build our product line. It takes money to make money.

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