1. Seagate has a 43Gig hard drive out now?! Whoa. Definitely count
on storage making a "comeback." As if it ever left. With 43Gig I think
I could keep locally every web page I've ever surfed since 1993, minus
all the multicast audio and video sessions of course. Wow. With 43Gig
I could keep the 3Gig of email I've received since 1990 and still have
room for all the email I'm going to receive until I die. Minus the
audio and video attachments, of course. Now if I could just find
someone to read all that email for me...
2. I wonder where Andreeesseeen got the number "3%" from.
3. I love the following paragraph. Suicidal indeed:
> Consider your humble columnist. His output expresses itself in the
> medium of Microsoft Word, but his output is mere droplets compared to
> the sea of incoming material. If his Word program crashed, he might be
> distressed, but pad and pencil always remain at hand. If he lost Dow
> Jones News/Retrieval, Nexis, NewsEdge and other resources too top-secret
> to be disclosed here, he would be suicidal.
4. And, I agree that customization is the key to the Web realizing its
full commercial potential. Forget the desktop, it's a bootstrap to get
to the real, totally interactive, totally connected experience that one
day munchkins will give us (in a carrying case designed to look like one
of those Star Trek communication devices, drool drool):
> Consider again your columnist's desktop. The real software opportunity
> of the Web consists not in battling with Microsoft over commoditized
> bits of plumbing. The big money lies in developing the customized bits
> for thousands of businesses that lust to use the Web to interact with
> their customers.
5. Provocative conclusion. And the collection of talent keeps growing...
> Their real fear is not Microsoft's supposedly abusive business
> practices, but its $12 billion in cash coupled with the greatest
> collection of software research talent ever assembled.
Full article included below:
>
> Netscape Hype: An Epilogue
> By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
> Wall Street Journal Interactive, May 27, 1998
>
> Three years ago, Netscape had one of the most stupendous first stock
> offerings ever. Marc Andreessen, the 24-year-old programmer who designed
> its web browser, became a star. Pretty soon the market had awarded the
> untried company a market cap of $6.5 billion.
>
> That's the market's job, to take a flyer on the future, but what's silly
> and depressing is how long it takes some people to catch up with the
> fact that things need not always turn out as predicted.
>
> Neither the market nor Netscape can afford to be as wedded to
> obsolescing scenarios as the Department of Justice. Investors long ago
> started valuing Netscape on its real business prospects, not a
> back-of-the-envelope conjecture under which Netscape would refight the
> battle of the desktop with Microsoft.
>
> That scenario was flawed, not least because it treated personal
> computing as a mature market, as if the only thing worth doing was
> fighting back and forth over existing turf.
>
> Here is where the wool got pulled over Justice's eyes by Scott McNealy
> of Sun Microsystems and Oracle's Larry Ellison. They touted the supposed
> technological inevitability of the "network computer." No longer would
> we have to bother ourselves with a hard drive or stock up on Microsoft
> bloatware.
>
> Using our Netscape browser as our surrogate operating system, we would
> download programs written in Sun's Java to perform the functions we now
> rely on Microsoft's software to perform. Only Microsoft's predatorial,
> monopolistic business practices stand between us and this nirvana. Best
> of all, it would cost only $1,000.
>
> The wind had hardly carried these words off when we could have a real
> computer for $800. It can do everything the network computer does, and
> it allows the user the flexibility and independence of having software
> and storage under his control.
>
> The choice is no choice at all. Seagate has a 43-gig hard disk out now.
> With millions of users peeling down more and more web pages of greater
> complexity and size, count on storage making a comeback. One way or
> another it will provide a cost-effective buffer against congestion. And
> it leaves the individual user in charge of a valuable piece of cyber
> real estate.
>
> So the clunky and complicated PC has its place, and Microsoft has its
> lock on userdom. To Sun and Netscape this may seem a bad thing, but for
> userdom it's not a problem.
>
> In the view of Netscape's Mr. Andreessen, the computer must become
> easier to use. Only then will it expand its hold from 3% of the world's
> population to the 20% that Mr. Andreessen sees as the next natural
> plateau.
>
> An interesting view, but most of the market still consists of intensive
> users, people who sit at their computers for eight hours a day.
>
> From their perspective, Microsoft's "monopoly" looks pretty benign. It
> may supply the operating system and universal applications like word
> processing, spreadsheets and browsers. But most of the value on the
> desktop resides in proprietary software developed by third party vendors
> or by a company's in-house programmers.
>
> Consider your humble columnist. His output expresses itself in the
> medium of Microsoft Word, but his output is mere droplets compared to
> the sea of incoming material. If his Word program crashed, he might be
> distressed, but pad and pencil always remain at hand. If he lost Dow
> Jones News/Retrieval, Nexis, NewsEdge and other resources too top-secret
> to be disclosed here, he would be suicidal.
>
> The Microsoft commodity is a vital one, but it serves mainly as a
> handmaiden to the really valuable stuff on the desktops of serious
> users.
>
> Now the other category of humans who are equally unoppressed by
> Microsoft are the timid, casual users. They want a machine they can turn
> on and use without having to solve any brain teasers.
>
> Considering that both groups must be accommodated and brought along on
> the same flotilla of software, Microsoft has done an amazing job. And
> the company knows the world would fragment along lines of competing
> standards the minute it stopped improving Windows.
>
> Such a fragmentation the Justice Department believes would be in the
> interest of consumers. Its brief against Microsoft reads like an
> industrial policy document promoting the Netscape-Java-network vision of
> computing. Justice is living in the past. It believes the world wants a
> competitor for Microsoft's standard equipment, when what the world
> really wants is brand new stuff.
>
> If the truth were told, nobody in software really wants to fight it out
> over the operating system or universal programs like word processing and
> browsers. Sun once floated a Windows clone to run on Unix, but quickly
> lost interest. Novell has entertained and dismissed the same thought from
> time to time. Why bother? Why fight over a heavily defended but
> circumventable hedgerow in Normandy when the road to Berlin lies open?
>
> Consider again your columnist's desktop. The real software opportunity
> of the Web consists not in battling with Microsoft over commoditized
> bits of plumbing. The big money lies in developing the customized bits
> for thousands of businesses that lust to use the Web to interact with
> their customers.
>
> Netscape, having gotten over its own hype, no longer yearns to reinvent
> a wheel already adequately invented by Microsoft. Last week Mr.
> Andreessen announced a deal to license software to Citibank for its move
> into Web-based banking. Multiply that by every large business in the
> world, and you have the logical place to invest software resources in
> the future. Netscape should thank Microsoft for providing a common
> platform for millions of users who can tap into Citibank's Web site.
>
> It is entirely possible that the Justice Department acts without fully
> understanding its own motivations. At one end of the feedback loop,
> bureaucrats armed with the vague mandate of the antitrust laws look
> around for ways to make a splash. At the other, Silicon Valley delights
> in bad mouthing Bill Gates, feeding an atmosphere in which attacking him
> and his company becomes politically acceptable.
>
> Their real fear is not Microsoft's supposedly abusive business
> practices, but its $12 billion in cash coupled with the greatest
> collection of software research talent ever assembled.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
A former FoRKer eventfully pontificated in April 1998: "wondering if the
Microsoft policy is simply to hire every functional mind on the planet
to create a monopoly of thought."
Said event triggered the following response from a Microsoft FoRKer:
"no, we already have that. Now we are merely backfilling to create the
*appearance* of a monopoly of thought. All candidates are chosen primarily
for the grapevine value that attends their transition into the Borg."