Why Netscape Has No Case Against Microsoft
from the they-lost-fair-and-square dept
A very well done article at Salon explaining why Netscape has no real case against Microsoft. The points do make a lot of sense. Basically, the article says that Netscape lost because Internet Explorer became a better product for less money (in this case, free). While Microsoft may have done other bad stuff, Netscape never would have been able to keep the market share they wanted anyway, and thus the case is a waste of time. While I'm no fan of Microsoft, I think the author is probably right on this one. Most people I've spoken with who were in a position to know what was going on, believe that Netscape's management team hurt themselves more than Microsoft ever did.
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give me a break
I guess I'm astonished how anyone could think that a company like Microsoft, with its tens of billions of dollars in the bank and army of programmers, could fail at making a better HTML browser and give it away for free to boot.
Microsoft, with its Windows cash-cow, utterly wiped out a promising start-up company, and this is wrong no matter how you look at it.
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Re: give me a break
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A better mousetrap
There is nothing wrong with making a better product. However, at the time when this started, I feel that MicroSoft did not have a better product. In the shop we called it MicroSoft Exploder. These days I find Explorer to much better than Netscape
Anyway there is more to the MicroSoft monoply case than who had the better product
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Re: A better mousetrap
Yes, the early versions of IE sucked. I was one of the longest holdouts in sticking with Netscape until I just couldn't deal with it any more and had to switch to IE (though, now, I split time with Opera a lot).
The point is, though, that Netscape's argument for damages is weak, because there's not much in the way of damages, since they wouldn't have kept the market no matter what they did - since their product just wasn't as good (eventually) as Microsofts.
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Re: A better mousetrap
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