March 14, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Arnold Kling has a very
Arnold Kling has a very interesting pieceon Netscape's server software that also functions as a useful addendum to my Salon article.
As someone who attempted to use Netscape's server technology, I can tell you that if there ever was a company that deserved to lose, it was Netscape. The software was expensive, bug-ridden, horrendously documented, and miserably supported.Netscape would set up support forums for their server software that required paid subscriptions (on top of what you already paid for their server software) where there were no Netscape engineers to available to answer questions! Ultimately, these turned into buyer-venting sessions, where we ranted against Netscape and suggested alternatives to one another.
With its engineers totally walled off from the user base, each release of the Netscape server was worse than its predecessors. Ultimately, for my company, I chose the JavaWebServer.
The funny thing about the Netscape/Microsoft battle is that it's possible to argue that it was Netscape that acted like a monopoly: sitting there fat, dumb, and happy while someone else took their market share away.
Microsoft's initial releases are almost always junk that no one wants to use (I'd say always, but just because I can't think of an exception, doesn't mean there wasn't one). That's because Microsoft's business strategy relies on getting a product -- any product -- out early to establish a market presence, and then using the feedback from the market presence to relentlessly improve the product. You may not like the kind of code they write, but they are awfully good at developing a "look and feel" that makes consumers happy. As I argue in the article, this consumer focus, at the expense of developing innovative or elegant technology, is what gives the company its bad rap among technology people.
Netscape, on the other hand, is highly technology focused (which is why it was so funny/sad to see them eaten by the other great consumer conglomerate, AOL.) They built a great product, but they were not as aggressive about improvements as Microsoft was, especially on the consumer side. Unfortunately, they got a little soft in the days when they were the only game in town. Confident that there was no real competition from Microsoft, they introduced a passable browser -- Communicator 4.5 -- and some reportedly iffy server software. Unlike Microsoft, they didn't maintain an aggressive focus on consumers, as Kling's piece shows. Every release of a Microsoft product gets better. Netscape products got worse. In fairness, some of the decline in the server software was allegedly due to the fact that they had slowed the pace of browser development to focus on other things, and when IE 4.0 turned out to be decent, they had to pull back resources from everything else to hurl at the browser development team. Which didn't seem to help, of course, because Netscape 6.0 was worse than Communicator. And also in fairness, Netscape pretty clearly thought that it could takes its customers for granted because -- well, because it was Netscape. That's monopoly thinking.
Netscape was too confident that users would continue to use its technology simply because it was already the dominant technology in the market. They took the wrong lessons from Microsoft. Microsoft is not the technology leader in the market (by a long shot), but that doesn't mean the company doesn't innovate. It focuses its innovation on consumer features, which is what makes it so successful. Netscape assumed that once it had established dominance, it didn't matter that much what the company sold because the brand and the network effects would carry it. That's an assumption Microsoft never made, which is why it's around today.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 14, 2002 08:55 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links