
Sure, the Netscape extensions are nice. And it's nice to have an operating system (M$-DOG) pre-installed on every hard drive. But Net$cape, like M$, was trying to esablish a dominant "follow-us-or-die" position in the industry.
that was exactly the view I was trying to discredit us in my post. did Netscape protect their creations with patents? no. what did they
Of course not. If they "protected" their creations with patents, a lot of people would be less likely to use them. If the Net$cape extensions weren't used, everything would look fine on other browsers and there would be no pressure on the remaining non-netscape users (25%?) to switch to Net$cape.
why or how they were trying to squelch competition? what kind of squelching is possible in a world where the next version of anybody's software can immediately incorporate their own features?
The "Why" can be answered very easily: $$$. Netscape is not some not-for-profit thing like PGP, Netscape is a COMMERCIAL CORPORATION. Keep that in mind while I explain the "How"...... I think it is not unlike what Micro$oft did in the early 80s... They put out a good OS (it was considered good at that time) and sold it really cheap, and they obtained a large market share. Since they had such a large market share, most of the software developers wrote for M$-DOS. Since practically everyone was writing for MS-DOS, the public bought MS-DOS. Other OS developers could write M$-DOS clones, but they would be just that- clones. They would have no reason to write in new features, since very few people would be bold enough to write software that wouldn't run on M$-DOS. The OS makers would be condemned to forever follow Micro$oft and try to maintain compatability. To this day, the mass market still centers around the MS operating system. With Netscape, it was similar... They put out a good browser (And I'm not arguing there- IMHO it's the best browser currently available) for really cheap, for many people it was even Free. They've obtained a large market share. Since they have such a large market share, everyone writes web pages for Net$cape. Since there are now so many "Get Netscape!" web pages, even more people are switching to Netscape. Sure, other browsers could add their own extensions, but if they won't work on Net$scape, nobody will use them. And every non-net$cape browser will be OBSOLETE as soon as the next version of net$cape comes along with it's new extensions.
picked their standard. can you tell me how netscape twisted a single person's arm to put netscape tags in their web pages?
No arm twisting was necessary, once Net$scape had their large market share. Just as there was no arm twisting to get people to write software for MS-DOS and Windoze. Once a software company has a large enough market share that they can define the standards for everyone else, they are extremely difficult to "de-throne". At least Net$cape isn't abandoning the *official* HTML standards. Before I sign off, I will say that Netscape is a good browser. It may well be that they simply created the extensions to make the WWW better. But, since Netscape *IS* a commercial company, I tend to believe that they did it to ensure their own profits. Really, there is no Real Proof either way, so this tends to be a rather controversial (and opinionated) topic. Some good might yet come from this... If Netscape and Microsoft start battling over the "Web As An Operating System" market, Net$cape and Micro$oft might chip away at each other enough to let the smaller companies catch up. (Wishfull Thinking) I guess this is kinda off the topic of the Cypherpunks list... I think we should just "agree that we disagree" and let the matter be. ======================================== [This email signatu r e file is best viewed with the FooBar Mailer Program] ======================================== ;)