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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19925)	6/5/1998 3:03:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

So, do you mean to tell me that there is truly no benefit in the integration of the functionality of applications such as Trumpet (winsock), faxing services, calculators, notepad, sysedit, clipboard viewers, telnet, graphics acceleration, read forward disk caching, disk compression, the list can go on. First of all, most of the things you mention here are not in fact integrated into the OS. The few that are integrated have to be because they access shared hardware resources. Moreover, most of the things that you mentioned that are not integrated are utilities, not full-fledged applications. Perhaps the one thing in your list that stands out is the faxing services. This is the one instance of something that is clearly an application. And yes, I do not believe that it should be bundled with the OS. Would you pay $50 for an OS and though shoppign around for all of these utilities or would apy $80 for a integrated (or bundled) package (assuming you don't engjoy shopping more than computing:-)? If MSFT had any real competition in the OS market, they would probably not be selling the OS for more than $30-45. Then if the Faxing product, for example, was unbundled, other competitors would be around, and the product would have to be priced competitively. Moreover, I would suspect that the majority of consumers would find that they really don't need the Faxing product, and thus would not buy it. Therefore, they'd save money and have a better system (less hard disk clutter, fewer icons and menus dealing with features that they don't use, etc.) Do you think they would operate as smoothly as Windows 98 or 95 if they were all purchased separately? I have no problem with bundling the utility programs. As far as full-fledged applications, I do not believe that MSFT has any advantage of providing apps that operate more smoothly than any competitor. Navigator is poorly written, for it appears that most of the functionality of the Communicator package are closely integrated with the html rendering engine, which if I am not mistaken is basically what a core borwser is. The assumption you are making is that there is something such as a core browser that just does html. While that is recognized today as the case, it wasn't so when Navigator was first designed and built. Sometimes layers are not identified until after the pioneering products are on the market. Later product iterations progressively get better at layering. If you check out the newest iteration of Navigator (Mozilla 5.0), the html engine is indeed separated out.