Tag: Microsoft

Scott Loftness's reply about Walled Gardens to Dave Winer's Google post (which I was following every rising and falling Southern-style cadence until I got to the phrase "bright eyes of happy independent developers" and I dissolved in a fit of giggles caused by images from dog-food commercials...do these developers have a glossy coat and warm wet noses too?) got me thinking... I think Netscape is, or was the most important Internet company there has been so far. You won't see that in the histories - Netscape is deemed a valiant failure against the mighty juggernaut of Microsoft. But were they a failure? They forced Microsoft, a company not known for it's willingness to give it's intellectual property away. They developed RSS initially and let others such as Dave Winer develop it (maybe they abandoned it, lost interest, but they didn't do a Microsoft lawyer attack or a British Telecom style sneaky patent to trip up people like Dave who continued the work). They developed the first viable browser, and I seem to remember was the first to do such things as frames and objects - then used for awful Java applets of shimmering lakes, but eventually becoming the all important .NET ActiveX objects that power Microsoft's MSN online world. I'm a child of the Web 1.0 (or web beta revolution) - I started programming in HTML in 1996 when Netscape 2.0 had tutorials and you could fit it all in one (slightly crammed) page...without Netscape I wouldn't be here...are they a failure? I don't think so. And they did so by being open and probably dooming themselves to commercial failure giving away all their assets...but the children of Netscape live on (oops I'm becoming a bit Dave here) in the Open Source movement, in all web technologies, and the fact that Microsoft never could charge for IE (although I seem to remember it tried). Online streaming? Yep. Annoying animated gifs? Err, well you can't have em all... They also inspired Firefox, my browser of choice...but that's another story.

Tag: Microsoft

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