 |
 |
 |
|
Contrarian Thoughts on the Microsoft Ruling
2 May 2000
Microsoft has succeeded for many good reasons and one bad one. It gets scant credit for the good reasons — most of which reduce to lessons of Marketing 101, relentlessly applied — and ample credit for the bad reason, which is that it often behaves brutally toward both its partners and its enemies. But even this reason is not fully understood. Because the real problem is that we all understand "competition" and "competitiveness" in terms of two very different conceptual metaphors that employ almost exactly the same vocabularies. Those metaphors are sports and war. By both we "attack," "defend," "flank," "command," "dominate," "control," "retrench" and so on. In fact, the language of war pretty much is the language of sports. But there is one important difference. In a war, all is fair. In sports, fairness is all. War has no rules. (Ask the people of Sarajevo or Hiroshima.) Sports has lots of rules. Battlefields are rarely level. Playing fields are always level. Business is not regulated by rules of war. The "competitiveness" about which business law speaks does not comprehend the right of one company to "cut off the air supply" of another. Microsoft tried mightily in The Trial to convince Judge Jackson that the computer and Internet worlds were battlefields and not playing fields. They failed, because Judge Jackson — and the entire regulatory system &Mac226; looks at business as sports, not war. (Of course in truth it might be neither, but let's not go there.) Oddly, almost nobody talks about how Microsoft failed to choke Netscape any better than Netscape choked itself. The simple truth is that nothing hurt Netscape more than its own dumb behavior in the marketplace. Netscape was born with enormous advantages. It made the first popular browser, which quickly got a nearly unanimous market share. Browsing — even the Net itself — was quickly understood on Netscape's terms. And for a while there, Netscape made some brilliant moves that gave Microsoft fits. One was buying and universalizing a directory access protocol called LDAP (see A Bulldozer through the Intersection)&Mac226; which threw a monkey wrench into Microsoft's plans to universalize the file system in (what was then called) Cairo. But at some point Netscape started smoking too much of its own exhaust. A number of times it publicly declared that its browser obsoleted Microsoft's (and everybody's) operating systems (Marc Andreessen said an OS was "just a device driver"). They also did did little to truly advance the browser as application with virtues for demand, rather than supply. They charged money for their browser and gave useless customer service, even to their paying customers (as I learned repeatedly, since I was one of them). They hired people from Apple and other clueless companies who shifted the company strategy from technical leadership to jumping on every passing bandwagon. They added channels during the "push" craze. They portalized the Netcenter during the portal craze. They turned the browser from an uncomplicated single-purpose application to a mishmash that included: a bad authoring tool, an ordinary newsgroup reader, a subpar email application and a misleading search system. That last one was infuruating. Through Version 3.x, a word typed in the Netsite (location) bar, followed by ENTER or RETURN would default to that domain name. The new system defaulted to a econd directory in which words were sold to the likes of Disney and Ford, so user location bar entries would go to unintended locations, or to confusing search results. For an example, typing "scripting" in the Netsite bar, and doing the same in the Address bar in Internet Explorer (any version). The system was dumb, user-hostile and net-hostile. There was also the matter of engineering. By the time Netscape was sold (expensively) for scrap to AOL, the dirty secret was that its browser code wasn't competitive, and hadn't been for a long time. The Mozilla project, which opened the source code to the Netscape browser, was launched with old code that has since been abandoned almost completely. In other words, Mozilla.org had to start from zero a year or more after it appeared to start from an advanced position. Jamie Zawinsky's open letter of resignation tells the story in painful detail. That story also includes an innocent but killer detail: "we realized that we had finally lost the so called 'browser war.' Microsoft had succeeded in destroying that market. It was no longer possible for anyone to sell web browsers for money." In an interview with Robert X. Cringely for public television, Netscape founder Jim Clark pointed out that millions of people downloaded the Netscape browser for free, then added that Netscape "should be able to make money in there somewhere" (or words to that effect). Today we've forgottenthat the browser was born free: as free as Linux, SendMail and Apache. Making it free again (in cost if not in code) was a brilliant and insightful move by Microsoft that was utterly lost on Netscape, which was making money by charging for the "product" and unwilling to play smart chess by making a reciprocal sacrifice. The original Mosaic — like Apache, Linux and SendMail — helped create the Internet's infrastructure. Netscape should have left it free and tried to make money elsewhere (as it eventually did). But they tried to squeeze revenue for far too long out of the browser, and it was a fatal mistake. They also finally — and fatally — adopted a legal strategy. Afraid of losing in the marketplace, they went after Microsoft with lawyers. This was also a bad move, because it shifted energies from innovation to litigation. (The failed Apple suit against Microsoft should have been instructive here, but wasn't.) So, in effect, Netscape was a Mazda Miata being chased down a mountain road by a tractor-trailer. The were gaining until they fixated on the rear-view mirror. That was where they were looking when they went off the cliff. Why blame the tractor trailer? Well, one reason is because the driver was a mean SOB. But a better reason was because he lied, or at least shaded the truth. Microsoft repeatedly denied in the trial that it played hardball. I recall the testimony of one underling to the effect that a hostile Bill Gates email was anything but. This was like Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with "that woman." But the truth was even more plain in Bill Gates' case. The term "hard core" is one of Bill's favorite expressions. His mercilessness (even to his own failing products) is legendary. Why deny the obvious? I believe Microsoft would have been much smarter to simply admit that it played hardball in some cases, just to buy some of the credibility it needed to contesting the many other truly arguable technical issues in the trial. But they tried to win it all. They tried to crush the competition. They tried to win a war against the rules of sports sanctioned by The American People in whose name the suit was brought. Bad idea, although totally in character. Still, I doubt Judge Jackson will succeed in breaking the company up. Microsoft will fight this thing, hard, for years. And why not? It's their nature. — Doc Searls
|
