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

To: rudedog who wrote (21719)	11/24/1998 1:25:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> The browser as a user interface is as doomed as the GUIs which came before it. It will be replaced by a new interface appropriate to the environment which is evolving, and we don't yet know what that is. This is not way in the future stuff, <<< OK, this is pretty confusing. The GUI was invented 30 years ago or more, and is still around. Not only that, the browser is a kind of GUI. Also, perhaps you need net standards to make a big new environment change happen. At least people would have to have an interface like Java (when it works and is distributed everywhere fairly homogeneously) or some other programming interface to make that happen. People will need to be trained, systems put in place, standards set, and still you will be seeing it all through some kind of application or 'network OS' or whatever that provides a view on a monitor. That will not be so very different in the user experience from now, unless the computers start controlling us instead of us knowing what we are accessing. OK, other devices will be attached to the internet, embedded systems and so forth, but they won't impinge on our consciousness much, and they won't need much in the way of new network foundations beyond IP6 and Java, as much of what they do can be proprietary. If you are no longer having the fundamental experience on your own time of viewing the web through a monitor, that will be a basic change that is going to take some real time to happen. If you are talking about some kind of viewer that doesn't work on HTML and so on I think that would take time too. So, this sounds kind of like future stuff - in the latter case a minimum of five years before HTML browsers become irrelevant (it's been how many years since Gopher? And I would still call viewing information on a net through a screen browsing), in the first case who knows. You are proposing a fundamental unknown new technology. TV took 60 years from conception to successful commercial implementation, the auto 40 years, the web 10 years or so, the raw internet 10 or so. Companies and the government are in the process of investing huge sums in HTML code and current back end server technology built around ip4-6, HTML, and the browsing concept. Almost all of the content presented is going at some point through HTML pages or is accessed through links in pages. I think there is some lock-in happening here. People are not going to want to throw this away. Perhaps anything as radically different as you suggest, which would throw out the concept of browsing via software, may take a little time. Net appliances without local storage and removable media and useful general purpose features (having which makes the computer a PC in my book) have fallen with a resounding thud in the market. Once a medium is established, innovations take time. Look at 3D TV and high res. We could have done either any time in the last 10 years, with the will. Fairly cheaply any time in the last 5 years. The content providers wanted none of it, as the change demolishes the value of their assets. And the users go where those assets are. Now there are hundreds of billions of dollars in net content assets, I would guess. Based on the hundreds up to millions of dollars those millions of web sites have spent per each. I see events over the next ten years as more incremental than that, but I would find it exciting if it were otherwise. But radically different ideas than browsing or embedded systems may find themselves in the same spot as those paper publishers who try to innovate with new paperback or magazine form factors. Very incremental. Not likely to happen fast until folks stop buying the old systems. If they are even more radical these ideas and technologies will constitute a new medium, and the history there is that the old basic media generally survive and incrementally improve. Sometimes this is fundamental, as with paper books. On the other hand, you have the vinyl record, the content for which has mostly gone elsewhere. But only because the basic format involved, the human audible sound wave, was the same, and the original material could be easily converted and even improved in the conversion process. However, I have no idea what your backup for all this is and I am certainly willing to be wrong here, as major changes in technology almost always benefit those of us consulting at the edge, where the rates are higher and are determined by your ability to master new techniques and technologies on the fly. I really hate it when they start to teach college courses in the things I do for a living. I would be happy for you to be right therefor, and I would appreciate any better direction you could give on where this new stuff might pop up. Cheers, Chaz