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

To: blankmind who wrote (16101)	2/15/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: t2	Respond to of 74651

They don't care as much as they did a while ago. Now AOL has the netscape browser and I would not expect a lot of other ISPs embrace it. I bet Prodigy Net loves AOL <g> (just saw some commercial)

To: blankmind who wrote (16101)	2/15/1999 11:22:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

I still don't see why MSFT cares whether you use their browswer or Netscapes. They probably don't anymore, but that's only because they killed off Netscape as a viable threat. Until that happened, though, Netscape's vision was a threat to Microsoft because NSCP wanted to supplant the Windows desktop. Andreason once predicted that Windows would soon be regarded as little more than "a collection of buggy device drivers". Whether they would ever have been able to implement their grand scheme is a different question. What's important is that Microsoft believed they (or someone else following their lead) might. The notion was that instead of booting your computer and seeing the Windows desktop, you'd boot the machine to a desktop supplied by Netscape. If a developer wanted to write an application, they'd write to the NS platform which would then take care of communication with the underlying OS. That would have been a big problem for Microsoft right there, but it might have gotten even worse if they were able to provide the same platform for multiple OSes, so that a single application written for the Netscape platform would run on an Intel machine with Windows, a PPC with MacOS, or a Sparc with Solaris. Just consider this: If you have IE4, try turning on the script debugger available from Microsoft's site and opening the MyComputer window. You'll see that IE4 runs JavaScript code even for some very simple housekeeping tasks. No big deal except that JavaScript (which has virtually nothing to do with Sun's Java) was developed by Netscape. Netscape managed to get its script language adopted as the internet standard. Microsoft's alternative was virtually ignored (and is now largely ignored even by MS). Those are standards fights that can be dangerous to Microsoft's dominance.