Stardate 20020516.1542

(On Screen): AOL is beginning to show signs that it may stop using IE in its standard package and switch to using the Netscape browser. This is greeted as news that maybe the browser wars may start again; and maybe Microsoft will lose this time. Hooray! Let's hope that Microsoft gets a bloody nose; they deserve it, the bastards.

No. Microsoft won't lose. The people who are thinking in these terms don't understand just what it was that Microsoft was trying to win.

Microsoft doesn't dislike Navigator. Microsoft also doesn't dislike Java. Microsoft has no interest in killing either of them off.

What Microsoft dislikes vehemently is portability. Microsoft's biggest advantage for its operating systems is the immense installed base of programs which run specifically on Windows and don't run on anything else. If you want to use one of the programs, you have to run Windows.

This didn't happen by accident. Microsoft has always spent an immense amount of money reaching out to software developers and working with them to make Windows their platform of choice. Microsoft spends huge amounts of money creating libraries of useful functions which it gives to developers through the MSDN. It's true that developers have to pay a nominal fee to be members of MSDN, but that money doesn't even remotely come close to paying for the work Microsoft does to support it. The purpose of that fee is to separate out legitimate developers from an army of hobbyist hackers; Microsoft doesn't want to waste its time supporting people working in their basements. So it's set somewhere in the range of $500 per year; high enough to prove that the subscriber is serious but not high enough to dissuade anyone serious from joining.

For that token payment you get example programs and massive amounts of documentation and huge amounts of source which you can use for free in your own programs. If you're important enough, you can even get Microsoft engineers to come visit you and help you.

So no operating system on any computer in history has had more commercial programs developed for it than Windows in its various forms. That, in turn, makes Windows far more valuable to potential customers than any other operating system irrespective of its actual characteristics simply because using Windows opens up access to so much.

That all vanishes if programs are being written in languages which have the ability to run equally well on any operating system. As soon as that becomes common, with the apps running in a meta-environment on top of the operating system, then operating systems become interchangeable, and Windows loses its biggest commercial advantage. That is what Microsoft is willing to go to almost any length to prevent.

If you want to make sure that a product you are developing will be destroyed commercially, then make a public announcement that it will make Windows obsolete. Then watch your dreams collapse around you as Microsoft lands on you like a ton of bricks.

IBM guaranteed the death of OS/2 by adopting the marketing slogan, "A better Windows than Windows." IBM worked to make it so that OS/2 could run any program that Win 3.1 could run, and Microsoft began enhancing the execution environment in Windows in such a way that OS/2 was always a step behind. Finally Microsoft found an enhancement which was impossible to emulate in OS/2 and released critical Microsoft programs in a form such that they used that enhancement, and by that point OS/2 was already on its deathbed.

Microsoft took on Sun not to kill off the Java language, but to kill off "Write once, Run anywhere". If Java became a serious development environment for client programs and if Java programs in byte-code truly could be run anywhere on any operating system and perform acceptably, then Windows was dead meat. Microsoft's goal in its multiyear struggle with Sun was to prevent that – and they succeeded.

By the same token, Microsoft ignored Netscape during the years when Navigator became the predominant web browser. Microsoft even worked with Netscape to help make Navigator work well.

Then someone at Navigator did something extremely stupid: they started talking about making the browser into a metaenvironment in which applications would run, without regard to the underlying operating system. Microsoft pricked up its pointy ears and said, in essence, "Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin." And began developing Internet Explorer.

Microsoft didn't necessarily want to kill Netscape off as such. That was, rather, a means to the end of preventing Navigator from becoming a cross-platform meta-environment where critical apps could run. By making IE good (and they did by the third release, as tradition says they always do) and by giving it away, they undercut Navigator's effective monopoly. By diverging from Navigator in critical ways, they divided the market and prevented a consistent meta-environment from being created, for it would have done them no good if IE also could run those browser-level apps. The damage would still have been done. It was the meta-environment which was the enemy, not Navigator.

And the browser meta-environment idea died, and won't be coming back in any way which can threaten Microsoft.

If AOL finally gives up on IE and switches to Navigator, then we may return to a situation where both browsers have a serious presence online. But Microsoft never cared about that. What this will not do is to threaten to bring back the i