Re: Industry Standard's Net 21

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endTECH.com)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 14:13:45 -0700


In a March 1997 Byte magazine article, they listed 6 ways Netscape was vulnerable
to Microsoft.

1) NT mometum
2) COM/DCOM, ActiveX more mature component framework
3) Desktop monopoly
4) Transaction Server, IIS 3.0 had transactions before Netscape's Enterprise 4.0
5) Language Neutrality, MSFT's multi-language approach is a big win with developers
and of course:

6) Open standards. "Say again? Netscape should fear Microsoft's support
for open standards? It's strange but sometimes true. Microsoft beat Netscape
to the draw with an implementation of Cascading Style Sheets. netscape will go one
better [??] with JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) [this project is dead as far
as I can tell], a JavaScript-programmable superset of CSS, but not until
Navigator 4.0. Meanwhile Microsoft can gleefully proclaim itself a better
Net citizen, in this regard, than Netscape. The rules are changing fast, and
so is Microsoft.

Pretty funny article, revisited.

Greg

Mark Day/CAM/Lotus wrote:

> And this pattern was the usual one. Netscape's sales story for a long time
> focused on how standards were great and they were the standards-compliant
> people. But their actual standards involvement was miniscule by comparison
> to the standards-leader image they claimed.
>
> --Mark