War Between Microsoft and Netscape Creates a Vexing Schism
Microsoft is making important headway in its effort to unseat Netscape as the Internet’s dominant power, but the intensifying battle between the two companies is creating a major split in the Net and new headaches for Net developers who are being pressure to take sides.
Netscape is responding to Microsoft’s marketing barrage for the Internet Explorer World Wide Web browser with the formal release Monday of its newest browser, Netscape 3.0. The new Netscape product includes a feature that will turn users’ e-mail baskets into repositories of multimedia files.
Hardly rocket science, says Microsoft. And even though Microsoft’s latest release was found to have a bug--the browser causes problems on sites that require a password--experts say the software giant has momentum on its side.
Although it is still well behind Netscape’s 70% share in the so-called browser war, Microsoft has more than doubled its share in the last two months, to about 16%. While cynics say Microsoft is merely buying market share by offering free subscriptions to users and advertising dollars to Web sites, most agree that Explorer now is every bit as good as Navigator.
The end result is that a market in which Netscape once set the de facto standard is increasingly being split in two.
This division could be further accentuated by Microsoft’s effort to impose a new Web site development technology called Active X, an upgrade of OLE--a technology used in advanced Windows applications--that provides a way of combining reusable software components.
While it’s a clever approach--software components used in thousands of Windows programs could be reused to build Web sites--the effort is a direct challenge to an emerging industry standard.
A competing group that includes IBM, Netscape and 680 other companies is backing an alternative standard that would work not only with Windows but with virtually every device that might one day be connected to the Internet.
Such standards battles are putting Internet content developers in a quandary.
“It’s a royal pain in the neck,” says Paul Sagan, president of new media at Time Inc., which runs the popular Pathfinder site. “We have to be sure our Web designs conform to both” companies’ browsers.
Typically that means ignoring the flashy new features made possible by Microsoft’s Active X as well as Netscape’s various proprietary features.
Net surfers using Netscape’s browser to view a Web site optimized for Microsoft’s browser face results that “range from mildly annoying to a systems crash,” says Joshua Greer, chief executive of Digital Planet, a Culver City Web design firm.
“The only way to solve the problem is to have a standard that is written down on a piece of paper,” says Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems Inc., developer of the Java programming language adopted by both Netscape and Microsoft.
When it comes to the battle over Active X, even standards-setting bodies are throwing up their hands.
“This is a major industry battle,” says Jim Miller, a research scientist with the World Wide Web Consortium, the key standards-setting body for the Web, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We can’t mediate this. It’s a political issue; it’s not technical.”
Microsoft, with its huge war chest and its control over 80% of the world’s PC desktops, is well-positioned for a long battle. The company will soon integrate its browser tightly into its Windows operating system, for example, a measure analysts say will increase its power to shape the future of the Net.
Netscape plans to respond by both integrating its browser into desktop operating systems, like Microsoft, and by building browsers that can be designed right into set-top boxes, hand-held computers, TVs and network computers.
But those new browsers won’t be ready until sometime next year, and in Internet time that could be way too late.
Following its offer Monday of hundreds of dollars’ worth of free subscriptions to popular Web sites such as Wall Street Journal Interactive and ESPN SportsZone to those who use its latest browser, tens of thousands of Net surfers are downloading the Microsoft browser everyday. The percentage of Web surfers using Explorer to visit SportsZone jumped to 12% last week from 4.5% on Aug. 1.
And Microsoft is offering lucrative incentives to content providers to use Active X technology on their Web sites.
In exchange for getting a new TV Guide-style site called NetGuide Live to use Active X, “Microsoft committed themselves to a significant amount of advertising,” says Newt Barrett, publisher of the new service. Barrett says his site will also be included in Microsoft’s list of hot Web sites.
Hollywood Online, which is owned by Times Mirror Co., said traffic to its site increased between 30% and 40% after it included Active X features and was featured on the Microsoft list.
Observers expect Microsoft’s browser share to jump again when CompuServe and America Online begin offering a customized version of Internet Explorer to their millions of subscribers early next month.
Still, many analysts say Netscape’s large share ensures it a strong position for some time to come. “Microsoft isn’t going to be able to use [Active X] to squeeze out Netscape and the 85% of the Internet traffic it represents,” says John Robb, analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research.
