Netscrape vs Internet Exploder. That was how aficionado’s of their various browser’s disparagingly referred to their competitors product in the mid to late 90’s. It was a heady time, evidenced by the hugely successful IPO of Netscape Corporation in 1995.
I recall when I first moved to Silicon Valley, working for a semiconductor fabricator on Ellis Street in Mountain View across from the sprawling new Netscape campus… It was an impressive sight for an impressionable young techie. I do remember wondering how they intended to support that infrastructure when their primary product was free. “Plugin search servers and advertising” was the answer I usually heard, and I remember wondering about that. Turns out that is a pretty fantastic model, but one dominated by google.
That leaves Netscape, well, officially dead. AOL, the current owner after purchasing the software in 1999, announced Friday they would cease active development effective Feb 1, 2008.
If you don’t know the story of this first mass market internet communications suite (there were predecessors, but Netscape really was the first browser to kind of put it all together), you might want to take a moment to familiarize yourself. The wiki article will do as well as any brief history. Suffice it to say that Netscape got there first, and better (in my opinion), but Microsoft countered by weaving their subsequent competitive Internet Explorer browser deeply into their desktop OS experience. This resulted in an infamous lawsuit which Netscape won - but the damage was already too great. Critical mass quickly flip-flopped, and by the Millenia IE had 90% of the browser market. But a key decision by Netscape in 1998 yielded something quite special - the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla, and its flagship release the Firefox browser, is the result of a bold development move by an open source group largely funded by Netscape. Netscape 5 code was scrapped and rewritten, and Firefox was eventually born. (Unfortunately for netscape they tried to release a version of this as Netscape 6 too early, and at a critical point in the browser market shift).
As Mark has already written, Firefox is a vastly superior browser to IE. It is more secure, more functional, and more fun. And because of this, its adoption rate is climbing, especially among Gen X and Y crowds. Overall, Firefox can perhaps claim 15% currently. But that number is climbing. Netscape fought the good fight… they lost the battle, but will win this war in my opinion.
What does this have to with Real Estate? A lot. More and more of what we do is online. Mark has already written an excellent article on whether browser compatibility should be a factor in choosing an MLS. It is that important; your browser is your window to the online world. And despite all the claims of cross platform applications, it rarely works out that way. So it becomes a question of whether vendors with services like MLS’s should adapt to the buggy, insecure ‘fix it after it costs too much to ignore it’ mentality of IE, or the open, agile and adaptive open Mozilla community.
I think the latter will prevail, and in the end we will have finally freed ourselves from the momentum created by what was an admittedly illegal monopolistic practice by Microsoft. And at that point, your window to the online world will be much more secure, much more functional, and much more fun. As we learn to appreciate that, let’s not forget those who fell in battle so that we could win this war.
R.I.P. Netscape.
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