Browser Wars & Who Will Win

Ray Van Eng (05/10/96)

The truth is when it comes to browsers, no one vendor wants to share the market with its competitors.

OK. Let's explore a little deeper into who is going to win in the future. Well, the Internet is still very much in its infancy and at this moment, Netscape definitely has the nod, even Microsoft chairman Bill Gates admits it.

What about the intranet which has seen a lot of growth lately? What's the picture there?

Behind corporate firewalls, most users are cruising along their web-based network with the Netscape Navigator. In fact, Netscape has stated that site licensing for their browser for use on intranets brought in much of the sales last year. Although the Navigator retails for US$49 a copy, some companies pay as low as $10 apiece for a few thousand licenses.

Wait a minute, isn't Microsoft's Internet Explorer free? True. But many companies are willing to pay the paltry sum and get a front-end client that can be used to access data from across all hardware platforms. For the corporate managers who have spend years struggling with the development of client/server systems in a heterogeneous computing environment, the browser and the intranet with its cross-platform functionalities are truly a godsend. That is precisely one big reason why Netscape has such a huge lead over Microsoft.

Many users are wary of the fact that Microsoft has a history of tying in their product to their proprietary architecture. This is in spite of the recent efforts from Microsoft who vowed to build their Internet products to embrace industrial standards and open systems. The Navigator's long-standing compatibility with UNIX, Mac and Windows systems is definitely a deciding factor in keeping clients happy especially for big corporations such as Hewlett-Packard who has licensed 100,000 Navigators in 1995.

Other reasons for choosing the Navigator include its plug-in architecture, security features and compatibility with Netscape's own proxy and other server products. For those reasons, Netscape's approach seems to be a better choice for running business applications. The upcoming Navigator 3.0 is certainly aimed at the corporate intranet market.

So the question is -- Will Microsoft be hopelessly forced to play second fiddle to Netscape? Hard to predict. Many IT (Information Technology) managers have a huge investment in Microsoft technology especially in the area of application development. Those who are already Microsoft shops will be lured by the Internet Explorer when it comes time to build an intranet. IT people tends to be a conservative lot. They spend years developing a corporate infrastructure and they don't want to wake up one morning and have to pick up all the loose pieces and try to fit them together. They want to stick with technologies that they already know and comfortable with.

With Microsoft's recent announcement of an integrated cross-platform approach to Internet application development based on technologies that many in the IT crowd are familiar with such as the Visual C++, Visual Basic, SQL Server, OLE controls (revamped as ActiveX controls) and the like, many corporate managers are at least keeping a keen eye on future development from the computer powerhouse from Redmond, Washington.

Anyway, Dataquest has just released some figures of the estimated worldwide browser market share as follows:

The biggest migration is from Netscape users who choose to upgrade their Navigator 1.1 version to 2.0. WebCrawler is a up-and-comer from AOL. Dataquest can be reached at http://www.dataquest.com.

On another technology level, Microsoft is down-playing the importance of browser. For example, with the incorporation of Java into the Windows operating system (OS), a Java enabled browser like the Navigator becomes less important. Instead of letting the browser to pull the OS in, Microsoft is trying to use its widely popular Windows OS to bring the browser under its tent.

Although today Microsoft offers Internet Explorer as a stand-alone browser, future plan calls for embedding Internet features including browser capabilities into the Windows OS itself. The user would then be able to browse any file, via a web interface, whether it is in a local hard drive, on the Internet or in another machine on a corporate network.

On the Internet world wide web front, Microsoft is very aggressive in packaging their browser with many information service providers such as America Online (AOL), CompuServer, cable companies, telecommunication companies, internet service providers (ISP) etc.

Does Microsoft has a fighting chance? You, the user, will ultimately be the judge.

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