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

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (22156)	12/15/1998 3:32:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Trumpet software made a software package that enabled winsock installation and configuration. MSFT did damage to thier business model by including Winsock in the OS. That is why I keep referring to applications. What Chaz and I are saying is that Winsock is a totally different type of software than a browser in that it is a low-level network driver, not an application. The difference between the two is important because it goes directly to the point of the reason why there is a consumer advantage to integrating Winsock (i.e. performance), whereas there is none by integrating the browser. Why is that? Browsing files is a natural function to include in the OS, and has been eagerly desired since the DOS days. You keep confusing the terms "integration" with "bundling". While there is advantage to some consumers in bundling the browser with the OS, there is no advantage of integrating it, like so much spaghetti code, into an inseparable mess into the OS.

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (22156)	12/16/1998 4:27:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> <Reg, that is a low-level device driver... a logical thing to include in an OS and one that needs to be integrated to get the best performance.> Let me address you and Chaz on this point. Trumpet software made a software package that enabled winsock installation and configuration. MSFT did damage to thier business model by including Winsock in the OS. That is why I keep referring to applications. <<< Here is how it was: Trumpet made several bits of DOS/Win 3.1 tcp/ip and internet support, including a stack, a newsreader, and so forth. So did Wollongong, FTP software, Eudora, and a number of others. Some of them included more functionality, some less. This temporary niche market had been created by MSFT reluctance to pursue this open standard. MSFT anticompetitive activity there had an opposite motivation to what you are thinking in connection with their final capitulation to tcp/ip and winsock. MSFT and IBM spent 10 years trying to shove an alternative proprietary protocol, Netbios/Netbeui, down our throats. Among other things this made it harder to use Suns and HPs as servers on our networks, which of course they wanted to avoid. Users were also screaming for Internet support for years, to no avail. Finally, events overtook MSFT: the internet was becoming unstoppable, Sun was near success creating their own Netbios for connection to windows networks, token ring still sucked, still wasn't truly routable, had lousy security, and was beginning to really smell compared to 100 mbit ethernet, the government was demanding tcp/ip for it's computers, etc. Meanwhile, the small vendors had never been able to get their acts together. The various brands of tcp/ip utilities were hard to install, and would seldom interoperate well, especially with real Unix machines. This was largely because of all the stumbling blocks and lack of help that MSFT/IBM had put in their way. But it was also simply because they were outside companies, trying to do bits of core operating system code, with predictable results. So, eventually the drivers ended up where they should have been all along. Those small companies in this space that had no other value at the time to provide, died out for the most part. If this had not happened, there would have been no way for Netscape to gain such progress on this platform, nor for the Sun server to achieve such prominence on MSFT Networks - exactly the kind of thing MSFT had been trying to forestall. So in fact, winsock was pro-competitive. This was not about applications, in that winsock is not an application, nor was the trumpet tcp/ip stack. However, there were applications competition stories involved. For instance, MSFT gave MSFT mail away for a while after that, helping to apply a coup de grace to those outfits that also were selling email readers or mail systems in addition to their tcp/ip stacks. OS is software that sits between the applications and the hardware. Drivers are software that allow the OS to talk to bits of hardware that might be variable (like different network cards.) To talk to those drivers, the OS must also have a driver layer that disguises the differences between them, say between a dialup connection for ip and a intel ethernet card for ip. That is the winsock level (actually I am way oversimplfying here, as there are many components and layers in the overall stack.) Anyway, above all that is the OS, which manages the connection between the applications and winsock (and other networking, the file system, the screen, and so forth.) Applications are programs that provide - application. They are named this way because they address particular ways that you can apply a computer to particular business or other problems. This maps the way scientists talk - the distinction between general mathematics and applied math, or applied science vs pure science. A computer with an OS was conceived to have general potential, which would only become useful to ordinary people through the writing of applications. To the extent that applications are embedded in the core OS, you sacrifice the general potential to create new, different applications based on that generalized OS, for a variety of reasons. Chaz