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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (33745)	11/11/1999 4:34:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

...MSFT should not have to be bound by the opinion of its competitors and detractors. I agree. The worst thing that could come of this case is a kind of micromanagement of technical decisions by legal experts. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been in that position for years. I happen to think (unlike most on this thread) that Microsoft bears greatest responsibility for putting itself in that position. Gates takes a little gee whiz concept that is the province of the techie and takes it to a much grander concept that captures the imagination of the public at large and not just the nerd. Sure they used Mosaic's technology but they licensed it legally and developed it to an art form. That happened, but it wasn't Gates who developed the vision. The story (as Microsoftees are wont to call it) coming from Mountain View was always more compelling during '95 and '96. Microsoft and Gates were floundering. Gates's vision had failed him in this instance. In '95, Microsoft succeeded in convincing several companies that a technology code-named "Blackbird" would be the wave of the future. It would allow businesses (content providers) to present a graphics-rich application to networked users. The network itself and the tools and protocols behind it were to be proprietary, just as AOL's offering was at the time. It was the former Mosaic team at Jim Clark's Netscape who shattered that vision by proposing a unique way to tie the desktop together with an open-protocol tool, the browser, using the open-standards internet to tie it all together. Eventually, Microsoft embraced the whole of Netscape's vision for the future, including the notion of an open-standards browser tool tied closely to the desktop. In the process, they had to abandon most of thier own notions for how this would be implemented. And this is important: Microsoft executed the vision far better than Netscape did. They did, indeed, develop the browser tool into an art form. IE 4 is in almost all ways a better browser than Netscape 4. It even does a better job than Netscape's browser of executing the story -- the vision -- developed not by Gates but by Netscape's team. In retrospect, I think there's good cause to argue that Microsoft could have won the "browser battle" on technical merits alone. But here's that element of classic tragedy in this case that I've mentioned several times before: The hubris of Microsoft's executives would not allow them to trust their own ability to win the battle on technical grounds alone. The term that Gates and Ballmer used at the time was "leverage the Windows franchise". They decided to enter what they knew was a legal minefield not for technical reasons, but for marketing and legal considerations. They had just signed an antitrust consent decree, so the executive brain trust had to know that what they were about to do could be construed as a violation. But they thought they could be clever and get around the violations. They created a hurricane of reorganizations designed not to create a better networked experience for the user, but to create a better legal case for their exclusionary contracts. It is remarkable and admirable that Microsoft's technical folks were able to create a superb and unified networked experience despite the unnecessary and counter-productive legal maneuvers of their executives.