- WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF THE NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR SOFTWARE
- WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF THE NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR WINDOWS
For all I know, that may still be the case.
WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF THE NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR SOFTWARE
The NHS, for example, has hundreds of thousands of PCs, and for years, if you wanted to sell software products to it, then they had to be able to run not just on IE but on a specific version (6) of the program. Companies and large organisations built their IT infrastructure around Internet Explorer. The Explorer franchise was a monopoly on steroids.īut it turned out to be a double-edged sword. By 2000, IE had a 95% market share it was the de facto industry standard, which meant that if you wanted to make a living from software development you had to make sure that your stuff worked in IE.
So Microsoft lived to tell the tale, and Internet Explorer became the world’s browser. The strategy worked: Microsoft succeeded in exterminating Netscape, but in the process also nearly destroyed itself, because the campaign triggered an antitrust (unfair competition) suit which looked like breaking up the company, only to founder at the last moment.
WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF THE NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR WINDOWS
Microsoft hastily built its own browser, named it Internet Explorer (IE), and set out to destroy the upstart by incorporating Explorer into the Windows operating system, so that it was the default browser for every PC sold. Given that Netscape had a 90% share of that market, Gates was effectively declaring war on Netscape. On Gates wrote an internal memo (entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave”) which ordered his subordinates to throw all the company’s resources into launching a single-minded attack on the web browser market. It was an operating-system company, after all. This spread like wildfire and led Netscape’s founders to speculate (hubristically) that the browser would eventually become the only piece of software that computer users really needed – thereby relegating the operating system to a mere life-support system for the browser. Andreessen and his colleagues left university to found Netscape, wrote a new browser from scratch and released it as Netscape Navigator. Make the pain go away.”īut even when Microsoft engineers built a TCP/IP stack into Windows, the pain continued.
“I don’t know what it is,” he shouted at subordinates on his return to Seattle. One of Bill Gates’s biographers, James Wallace, claimed that Microsoft didn’t even have an internet server until early in 1993, and that the only reason the company set one up was because Steve Ballmer, Gates’s second-in-command, had discovered on a sales trip that most of his big corporate customers were complaining that Windows didn’t have a “TCP/IP stack” – ie, a way of connecting to the internet. Then in the spring of 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released Mosaic – the first graphical browser – and suddenly the “real world” realised what the internet was for, and clamoured to get aboard.īut here’s the strange thing: Microsoft – by then the overwhelmingly dominant force in the computing world – failed to notice the internet. Two years earlier, Tim Berners-Lee had created and released the world wide web onto the internet, but initially no one noticed. By then, the internet was roughly 10 years old, but for its first decade had been largely unknown to anyone other than geeks and computer science researchers. But for old timers like this columnist, it draws a line under an interesting chapter in the modern history of the computer industry. So what? For most internet users the news probably ranked somewhere near the latest information about bond yields on Romanian debt. S o Microsoft has decided to “retire” Internet Explorer, its web browser.
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