If NSCP continues to fold in plug-ins like Norton Anti-virus and the power pack 2.0 package at this rapid rate, won't THAT open the eyes of the 80% market share Navigator users to see the simple path that exists to open platforms on the net? Windows starts to look like DOS by comparison (under the Navigator and IE GUIs) Talk about migration! In less than a year, NSCP has attracted some of the most successful add-on software developers to develop seamless Navigator plug-ins! If you project this out for another year, I bet MS Office will start looking like a RAD prototype compared to what the user will have available on the Browser/Client "platform". What we're seeing is the childhood of the C/S era. One of the interesting fallouts of this is that MSFT is being dragged away from the Wintel paradigm and into the Winscp paradigm. NSCP and MSFT are becoming strange bedfellows of the Internet.
Today, at home, I have Win95 up, I fire up Navigator, download a few new toys from NSCP, and cruise the net looking for sites that make use of the new tools, experiencing the newness of the net. I hardly use the other tools on Win95 except for configuring my online environment. I'm beta off than I was.
I'm fascinated with communication. Mail, news, forums, blurbs, and I think everyone else is, too. After you've paid your flat monthly ISP fee, it feels like the network is free. Being online for long stretches of time seems normal. Using standalone (non-networked) tools for anything seems disjointed, out of touch, outside my home, desktop environment. At work, all of the tools (including the OS) are on some unknown server, so I'm used to that kind of thing.
Bottom line...NSCP will go up for years and so will MSFT. And I'm guessing that Intel will too (along with SUN, SGI and ...)
PS. But what about IBM? I know they are very into the the Internet, and have been for years. My bet is that they'll buy a browser company very soon. They have loads of money, and they're not stupid or blind.
Jim |
