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

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (21392)	11/11/1998 6:37:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to of 24154

Just because they catch up from a coding perspective does not mean they will catch up in the market. Of course. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that, unless if there is a huge disparity of functionality between the products, the one that will gain the dominant marketshare is the one that gets the best distribution deals. Given this, it seems that MSFT was a shoo-in to win, no matter what NSCP did. Even if MSFT caught up in functionality (which they did) they would never have been able to meet yoru proprietary aspects and interface, if you would have desinged these barriers to entry in, as did MSFT with Windows and Office. I completely disagree. Eventually, they would have caught up, even with NSCP proprietary interfaces, and have been in a position to push their own proprietary interfaces, which is what is going on now. Remember, the browser market was fairly new, and the proprietary interfaces were not as numerous, complicated. Moreover, NSCP never had any proprietary lock from corporations, and I don't see how it could have in such a short time, especially with MSFT and its resources on their tail. Office 2000 allows Office users (practically everybody these days) to embed thier office documents directly into web pages simply by hitting a save command on the menu. These documents are embedded in the web page as small applets, and retain their FULL functionality, as well as any custom VB/VBA code that may have been added. They are very, very lightweight, and as you may have guessed, can only be read by IE. I suspect that this functionality is not difficult for NSCP to provide in Mozilla. It is probably just a DCOM-pluggable interface to an Active-X control. I don't believe that there is a threat here. This is a very good example of using proprietary extensions to erect a barrier to entry for the competition. This is what NSCP should have done when they had 90% market share. You did good with the Javascript since MSFT had a problem replicating it despite thier "800 bodies" on the job, but you didn't go far enough fast enough. Well, the problem is, as I already stated, I don't think such a race of proprietary extensions could have ever been won by NSCP. Moreover, if NSCP attempted it, not only all current resources would have to be devoted to it, but the staff would have to be greatly expanded, increasing costs substantially, and at the expense of building products in the area of Electronic Commerce, in areas in which competition with MSFT is almost non-existent and which are very lucrative. The desktop has already been won by MSFT, and attempting battle there would have been fatal.