INTERNET HISTORY NEWSLETTER - AUGUST 2005
Welcome to the Internet History Newsletter, brought to you by the
www.nethistory.info website. In this edition:
=> 10 YEARS AGO - how recent all of this is!
=> THE BROWSER WARS
=> WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
=> LINK TO THIS SITE
=> Subscribe/unsubscribe details
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10 YEARS AGO - how recent all of this is!
Some of you will be aware of the site we run at
www.internetmark2.org,
which looks at current Internet issues and some of the things that need to be
addressed in creating tomorrow's Internet. In this context, we recently
submitted some comments to a United Nations Committee looking at Internet
governance in the context of a World Summit on the Information Society (www.wsis.org)
We prefaced our remarks by referring to just how recent all of this history is.
Although it's easy to get carried away with thinking that the Internet is a
product of the 1960s or the 1970s,in reality very little happened until the
1990s. Indeed, events are happening this week and this year which will be major
chapters in tomorrow's History of the Internet.
We chose to look back ten years, and this is what we found.
10 YEARS AGO:
* most countries did not have top level domain names (.uk, us, .au,.de etc)
* most governments in the world had not used the world wide web
* Nobody had heard of Amazon or Yahoo, which were less than 12 months old
* Google did not exist
* We navigated the Internet using tools called Gopher, Archie, and Veronica
* We used browsers called Viola, Cello, and Mosaic
* Internet insiders thought that the recent split of the World Wide Web
Consortium from the Internet Engineering Task Force was a major issue which
might split the Internet
* Interactive television was the medium of the future
* Commerce on the Internet was almost non-existent
* People were worried about the roll out of IPv6 (and still are today!)
* The chapter of Internet history called the Browser Wars began
THE BROWSER WARS
(with thanks to the excellent Wikipedia article on the same subject)
By mid-1995, popular culture had begun to notice the web, and Netscape Navigator
was the de facto standard for web browsing at that time. An ex-colleague of Tim
Berners-Lee called Mark Andreesen founded the Netscape Corporation, which built
on the previous Mosaic browser to establish the first mass-market browser, the
Netscape Navigator.
In August 1995 Netscape becamea public company, fuelled by the success of the
world wide web, and, to may minds ushered in the Dot Com Boom (see our article
here which traces the
dotcom bubble to earlier non-Internet origins, however)
To that point of time, Microsoft had thought the future action would be in multi
channel interactive cable television. However the success of Netscape caused it
to release Internet Explorer 1.0 as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus Pack
in August 1995. Internet Explorer 2.0 was released three months later, and by
then the race was on.
New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet
Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features
often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time
of unstable browsers and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to
approach par with its competition with version 3.0 (1996).
In 1997 Netscape still held 72% of the browser market. But in October 1997,
Internet Explorer 4.0 was released and changed the tides of the browser wars. It
was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully
than Netscape Navigator 4.0.
A lot was at stake for these two companies involved in the browser wars. A
popular web browser could earn a lot of money: search engine companies would bid
to be the default tool used in the web browser, and other companies with a web
presence would bid to be listed in the default set of bookmarks which was
preinstalled with the browser. Since a web browser is a powerful gateway to a
great deal of information, the company which controlled this gateway could
conceivably have a lot of influence over its users.
Microsoft had two strong advantages in the browser wars. One was simply an issue
of resources: Netscape began with a nearly 90% market share and a good deal of
public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of
its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its
derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never
exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand.
The other, more important, advantage was that Microsoft Windows had a monopoly
in the operating system marketplace that could be used to leverage IE to a
dominant position. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even
though early versions of IE were markedly inferior to Netscape's browser,
Microsoft was still able to enlarge its market share. And IE remained free while
the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and
marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape
feature-wise that users had no desire to download and install Netscape.
Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:
* Netscape's business model was to give away its browser but sell server
software. Microsoft understood this and attacked Netscape's revenue sources,
bundling Microsoft's Internet Information Server web server "free" with server
versions of Windows, and offering Microsoft customers workalike clones of
Netscape's proxy server, mail server, news server, and other software free or at
steep discounts. This didn't have much effect at first, as much of Netscape's
revenues came from customers using Sun Microsystems servers, but the gradual
result was to make Windows NT more popular as a server for Internet and intranet
while cutting off Netscape's income.
* Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers requiring
them to provide desktop icons for IE, while penalizing them for shipping
Netscape on their computers.
* Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs to release branded
versions of Internet Explorer, and with few exceptions they did, meaning that
users of many ISPs were encouraged to use Internet Explorer and not Netscape.
* Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary
interface on IE rather than Netscape.
* Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool, FrontPage, that tended
to create pages that looked better in IE.
The effect of these actions were to "cut off Netscape's air supply," as stated
by a Microsoft executive during the United States v. Microsoft case (which
resulted in Microsoft being prosecuted for having used its monopoly status to
manipulate the market). This, together with several bad business decisions on
Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the
company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer
became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web
browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.
Thus ended the pioneering era of web browsers, with the dominant software
company dominating the market. Microsoft might have been a late entry, but to
this day it has remained dominant in the browser market, challenged only
recently by the excellent Mozilla browser.
Lovers of legal battles and supporters of the free software movement can see in
the browser wars classic examples of what began to happen as the Internet began
to move towards mass markets. And that move to mass markets most closely finds a
birthday in August,1995.
-> WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
"A fantastic Internet history resource, this portal points you toward a wealth
of blissfully nontechnical info tracing the international evolution of the
Net-as well as of computers and e-mail."
PC Magazine
"I really like this site. It is a wealth of info. I was wondering if you would
consider putting up a timeline to go with the text. Just a thought. Good luck
with this site!"
"I am very impressed by the work put into all this and I thank you."
" since my web site is in french, I was wondering if I could translate some of
the content on your web site to inform my visitors about the real internet
history". (we replied yes... happy to talk to translators and spread the word in
other languages)
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