The exploding importance of the Internet in the mid-90s brought tremendous change to the technology market. It forced industry leaders and followers to hastily adapt to the new opportunities and challenges.
It was a do-or-die time, and you had to embrace and adapt, or get extinguished.
To everyone but Microsoft, it seemed.
Despite the hurricane-force winds of change around them, the industry leading behemoth looked to be stuck in a recursive loop. While upstarts were racing in every direction, envisioning and implementing new uses for this growingly accessible platform, Microsoft seemed to be busy navel gazing, more worried about how to maintain the status quo.
Despite the relative success of Windows 95 -- the long-overdue migration to mainstream 32-bit computing -- Microsoft's slow-moving heft seemed to make them incredibly vulnerable during this critical transition period, making them appear a lumbering giant that could be toppled by the smallest adversary.
The young upstart Netscape appeared a likely candidate to shoot the mortal stone: Sales of Netscape's server and browser products yielded a revenue growth curve exceeding that of any software company in history. They were actually running a profitable business, which was a remarkable feat for a technology company at a time.
Their Netscape Navigator browser had fortified a seemingly insurmountable position in the marketplace . The company image was hip, and Mozilla adorned swag was flying out of their online store.
In that era of seemingly boundless opportunity, inebriated with the seemingly limitless potential of the company that he co-founded, Marc Andreessen made the infamous comment that the Netscape Navigator browser, coupled with the Java platform, would reduce Windows to an "unimportant collection of slightly buggy device drivers."
By then Gates had penned his famous internal "Internet Memo", demanding that the company focus on the Internet. The cruise ship Microsoft was ever so slowly changing course.
While the overwhelming majority of Microsoft's renewed focus turned out to be largely useless "internet-enabled" bedazzling of existing products -- the oft-lauded "turn on a dime" fiction about Microsoft's Internet revolution is grossly overstated -- where it really counted, the browser, Microsoft executed very well.
Microsoft's browser offering quickly became good enough that that average user couldn't be bothered to download and configure a competitor's products on their new PC (Microsoft didn't have to provide a better product, or even as good for that matter: It just had to be good enough to dissuade an average user from seeking out alternatives. This is a bundling reality used in all industries).
Add to that the fact that Netscape's development cycles got longer and longer, their innovation dried up, and their product got buggier.
Eventually Internet Explorer was the winning product on merit alone.
Soon we had an internet full of "Made for Internet Explorer" buttons. Much of the non-academic web had been Microsoft-ized, and you couldn't play unless you went where Microsoft was going today.
The rest is, of course, history: Internet Explorer rocketed to success, almost entirely at the expense of Netscape.
Knowing how things turned out, with the all-knowing clarity of hindsight, Andreessen's claims of course look like foolish bravado. Even at the time it sounded like nonsense: Java applets had shown little promise, delivering terrible performance, atrocious interfaces, and an awkward, crippled interaction with their host environment. The browser wasn't much better, limited mostly to rendering personal pages full of blink tags and gaudy color schemes.
I recall reading that quote from Andreessen back then (I believe in a Dvorak article in PC Magazine), puhshaw-ing in disbelief. I couldn't believe his audacity, and as a junior Windows-targeting developer at the time, with perhaps a bit of a fear of change (nobody likes when their skills, even at a beginner stage, are being obsoleted), I cheered on a Microsoft response.
"Bill Gates is going to CRUSH this guy!" I thought.
And of course Microsoft easily won that battle.
But are they losing the war?
Windows as an operating system certainly has a lot going for it: It is feature rich, demonstrates a lot of technical excellence, and can credibly measure up against any competitor.
Yet for many users over the past decade, there was no choice: Windows was obligatory. It was exactly this hegemony that Andreessen felt his platform was upsetting.
His prediction was just a decade or so early. And instead of Java being their tag-team partner, it's JavaScript/AJAX, Flash, and the innovation and power of modern console gaming.
I hit a local department store recently to look for some educational games for my pre-school aged daughter. This location never had an extensive PC software selection, but I was still surprised to find the entire section had been removed, save for a couple of relics sitting in a discount bin.
The entire area was taken over by game console and handheld software.
Thinking this was an anomaly; I drove across town and checked their competition, and then their competition's competition, only to find the same at each: No PC software at all was for sale.
No games. No typing tutors. No foreign language training. No photo management software. No pre-school aged games.
Baffled, I hit the local EB Games location. Over the years I'd purchased dozens of PC games there, so I was shocked to find no PC software at all (the exception being a couple of ratty late-90s era boxes in a wire-mesh bin).
Determined, I ventured to the local Future Shop (the Canadian equivalent to Best Buy, and in fact the chain was acquired by Best Buy a few years ago, causing much confusion as it came in concert with the actual Best Buy chain itself) to find a small PC software section. While it was much smaller than it once was -- where once there were rows dedicated to just productivity applications, now a miniscule little section caters to the entire gamut of software -- at least it was something.
However compelling, my personal anecdote doesn't really prove much, but it does correlate with industry metrics that have shown retail PC software sales to end users to be stagnating or in freefall. Businesses keep buying their Office and Windows licenses, of course, and niche groups keep satisfying their business need, but what once was a vibrant retail market for applications and games has virtually disappeared. Some of this has been supplanted by online purchases, including some new electronic delivery method (which is how I got Half-Life 2 -- an impulse purchase is well catered to by a simple online purchase with immediate satisfaction), but much of it has just disappeared.
Consumers just aren't consuming PC software anymore.
The reasons are obvious.
On the gaming front, the PC has seen incredible competition from gaming consoles. Not only have those competitors evolved into technical heavyweights, the simplification of the entire gaming genre has equalized the playing field: Where once a mouse and a keyboard were mandatory to play any decent game, most popular games now feature simple interfaces that are equally accommodated on any platform, and the complex simulator type games, once the consistent chart toppers, are largely unloved.
You don't need a mouse to interact with an onscreen flower menu. You don't need a keyboard to communicate via a headset and in-game Voice-over-IP.
Consoles aren't the only reason for PC gaming's decline -- general internet use has taken a lot of time that people would have spent gaming, some of that time being spent being entertained by the countless Flash-based, cross-platform games available now.
Doomsayers have being declaring the death of PC gaming for years, as generations of consoles have come and then gone and Windows gaming has remained, but never has it seemed as likely to actually happen. In response, Microsoft is attempting some Windows gaming branding; perhaps realizing that it was a linchpin of their occupation of the home; but their intervention is likely too late.
So what does any of this have to do with Windows and Netscape and buggy device drivers?
One of the primary reasons many users felt tied to the Windows platform was gaming: If you wanted to play any of the prominent games at the time, that collection of slightly buggy device drivers was very important, and the game-du-jour was usually very tightly coupled with the platform. Aside from a couple of exceptions, PC gaming overwhelmingly meant Windows gaming.
The Netscape browser certainly wasn't a replacement for this. Neither was the Java platform.
This situation led many prospective Windows migrants to declare that they would make the move to Linux or the Mac or FreeBSD or whatever, if only they could run their current gaming obsession on it. Dual-booting is a half-measure that seldom held, and the direct graphics card access meant that gaming couldn't be accommodated via virtualization, so more often than not they just stuck with Windows.
Across the industry hundreds of thousands of solutions have migrated to the web, and if anything the pace is accelerating. Despite Microsoft submarining the overly-capable Internet Explorer team -- a team that brought us many of the innovations that we now enjoy in competing browsers -- the genie was out of the bottle: Many had experienced the incredible platform freedom, wonderful deployment model, and rich interfaces provided by web applications.
The classic computer purchase justifications (as stated by a million pleading children trying to convince their parents that a new gaming rig will be productive for the household) -- balancing the checkbook, storing recipes, authoring and sending letters (now email), maintaining databases -- can all be very competently accomplished online, from any modern browsers available on dozens of platforms. In many ways the experience is superior online, given the accessibility of the data from anywhere at any time.
Not every task can be performed online or from a web browser, and for those needs a plethora of cross-platform, often open source options have appeared (ex. GIMP, Open Office). Yet it remains that for an average user, the overwhelming percentage of their computer time now will be spent in their add-in enabled web browser, perhaps accessorized by one of countless available, many-network supporting IM clients.
Which is, of course, where we circle back to Andreessen's prediction: The most popular, and arguably capable, cross-platform browser is the Firefox browser. It is the phoenix (and was originally named firebird) that rose out of the ashes of the collapse of Netscape, the source code open sourced and revitalized with a many year reworking. While its market share numbers remain relatively small, its influence has been absolutely extraordinary. Even for sites that see 100% Internet Explorer users, the freedom and diversity offered by Firefox often leads enlightened development teams to ensure that they facilitate it just as well.
The rules of the game have completely changed. While many were prematurely declaring the end of Microsoft's dominance for years (every year for the past 7 years or so has been declared "The Year of Linux" by some open source evangelist or other), it has been years since the field has been so open for actual competition.
It has been a long time since the choice of platform held so few caveats and limitations.
We are entering a glorious time when the operating system really is an unimportant collection of device drivers, no longer driving completely unreleated application choices.
