Mozilla: Sometimes govt. is answer to Microsoft
Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker
(Credit: Mozilla)Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker describes Firefox, the open-source Web browser, as "an anomaly."
While most Microsoft competitors lay down and die when Microsoft claims 90 percent or more of a market, Mozilla has fought back to earn more than 20 percent of the browser market.
Despite this success, Baker believes that government, and in the European Commission in particular, has a role to play in further leveling the playing field. As she notes in a recent blog post, government entities would perhaps have less relevance but for the antitrust activity that resulted in Microsoft's dominant market share in the first place:
Microsoft did not obtain its (Internet Explorer) hegemony solely through competition on the merits of IE. A number of illegal activities were also involved in creating IE's market dominance...The idea that Microsoft is an innocent victim (of European Commission intervention) is deeply flawed.
I interviewed Baker at length on this topic on Friday, and though I have something of a knee-jerk negative reaction to government involvement in markets and have argued against Mozilla's need for government bailouts, one thing she said particularly resonated with me. When I asked the most damaging thing Microsoft's activities had done to the browser market, Baker turned to psychology:
The Internet became mixed in people's minds with Microsoft. Many people conflated Windows with "the Web." Our first great challenge was to convince people that they could improve their life by making a choice in their browser. To this day, most people think of "the Internet" as the blue "E" (IE's icon).
It's always there on the desktop. The muscle memory of the blue E has been a giant problem for us and for competition.
In Silicon Valley, this might seem like an odd argument--"surely, everyone knows that IE is just a browser, not the Web, and that Windows isn't a browser or the Web!"--but outside the borders of highways 280 and 101, the argument resonates. Deeply.
Most people, as Baker continued, fear their computers or, at best, consider them somewhat foreign and difficult to understand. They just want them to work and aren't in the habit of using any software other than what comes preinstalled:
Just having things work when they turn on the computer gives people reassurance. Telling them to try something else, and thereby risk breaking this system, was a difficult proposition.
It's actually worse than this. Not only did Mozilla have to convince would-be Firefox adopters once; it has to do it over and over, as Baker suggests:
Every time someone buys a new machine, they have to make a decision to go out and download/install Firefox, even if they've already made that decision. There is persistent resistance to Firefox. We have 220 million users, and a lot of those users have had to choose Firefox more than once. That's an issue.
Again, had Microsoft achieved this coup with fair dealings, Mozilla might grumble but would ultimately learn to compete on Microsoft's terms, as it has for years.
But IE's "brainwashing" of the market didn't come through fair means, so Mozilla is getting involved in the European Commission's suit against Microsoft. Baker and her team have been granted special status that enables them to access Commission documents and offer their perspective on the proceedings.
Mozilla isn't looking for a handout. It's looking for a level playing field. It has managed to scratch out 20 percent of the browser market on Microsoft's terms. Imagine what it could do with a fair and truly competitive market.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I don't see how this makes MS or Apple unfair competitors. maybe Mozilla can convince the Linux distributions to make it the default browser and when Linux finally supplants windows on the desktop they will have acheived their goals through fair competition. Goverment is not the answer.
Or Mozilla could try advertising. I suspect that most people who are "afraid" of their PC don't even know that mozilla exists.
either way i find it hard to support government intervention. developers are to blame, ignorant consumers would learn to install firefox if the sites followed standards and their IE6 browser wouldnt render important sites for them.
Microsoft is paying OEMs NOT to bundle Firefox. This fact came out in the anti-trust case. The payment comes in the form of another few dollars off each copy of Windows. Michael Dell even admitted as much. IE 7 works pretty good. Until you contract the spyware/malware that is targeted towards all of the massive holes in IE. This where the consumers are really hurt. It doesn't cost HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc, anything to bundle Firefox, yet, Microsoft is making sure that doesn't happen. Firefox's 20% market share has been gained almost purely through word-of-mouth. They have had no assistance from OEMs. It's pretty impressive and the world will benefit from Govt intervention here. Normally, I can't stand Govt intervention, however, even the NFL needs some rules and referees to intercede sometimes.
I'm a rabid Microsoft fan (running Windows 7 7022 right now)..... but there are some things that Microsoft has done wrong.... making IE up until and maybe INCLUDING IE8 standards non-compliant is a big wrong they have done.
I just consider a browser something more of a utility that everyone expects to have on their computer at this point. applications like windows media player is something that is included with the os but it def doesnt need. double goes for apple itunes on imacs (everytime i get a security update on my imac i always have to uncheck 'update itunes', its really really annoying. its my work machine and i dont want itunes on there at all) browsers though, OS's need those.
as for bundling firefox with the os, that doesnt make it any better, your just including one more company into an unfair advantage. what about chrome? or opera? its a slippery slope, and you'll end up with a bloated installer.
im all for people using something other than ie folks, as someone who works in security. but i honestly cant think of a real solution that will level the playing field without aggravating consumers.
They do this through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), not some IE protocol. IE connects to the web the same way as every other browser--through HTTP.
@ducttape36
Did you remove IE or just the icon from the desktop? If you removed IE completely, you may want to publish how you did it so others can do it too, but I'm betting you just removed the icon, which still goes to the point that was made about not being able to uninstall it.
i just dont see how else were suppose to connect to the internet for the first time on a new pc without including a browser. anyone else have an idea?
by ducttape36 February 19, 2009 12:11 PM PST
i suppose thats true, but i think that has more to do with the way windows update works.
by ducttape36 February 19, 2009 12:40 PM PST
im talking about windows update through the control panel. im sure it uses ie protocols to communicate with the ms server, and if you already have that much code built into your os to communicate with a server, why not jsut take a little extra step and turn it into a browser?
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M$ apologists are so much fun because they simply are unable to hear the idiotic garbage spewing forth from their mouths. Why can't this one understand that the ONLY OS on the market today that requires a web browser for OS updates is winblows? Remove Safari in a Mac (drag it to the trash and empty the trash - it's gone. Period), or remove Firefox (or browser of choice) in Linux and try updating the OS. Guess what - it works!
IE can not be removed from winblows. Read that statement again, it's true. Anyone who says otherwise is a slave who's sold on their masters flavor of kool-aide. You can remove the shortcuts to IE only, but never remove the program itself. Winblows exloder shares code with internet exploder, so if IE is ever removed the OS falls apart and can't function anymore. That's sick and 90% of what's wrong with IE (the other 10% is the bastardization it's done to web standards in general).
Slaves will go to any extent to defend their master when they're scared enough of him.
Personally, I like IE7/8..... they are pretty good browsers. The problem is that they are unremovable, for one..... and the second is that they are too tightly intertwined in Windows XP, Vista and even 7.
Personally, I'd have no problem with this if Microsoft was the one who invented the web browser. But they didn't. The IE integration into Windows was for one purpose only: to kill Netscape, whom they viewed as a potential threat to the Windows platform (since Netscape was promoting a different application development platform of HTML and JavaScript that could kill the need for the Win32 API if successful).
And then when the competitive threat was gone, Microsoft stopped development on IE completely. If IE was such a vital component of the Windows experience as Microsoft claimed, why would they dismantle the IE development team after Netscape went out of business?
Re Apple: Apple bundles Safari with the Mac mostly because at one time, Apple could not count on anyone else to provide a good, up-to-date browser for the platform for them. And Safari is simply just another application in the system. You can easily delete it and replace it with something else and all other applications that access the Internet continue to work.
Too many people are ignorant regarding Microsoft's bundling of an application that they didn't invent, but were able to monopolize due to illegal bundling. As you said, had they invented the browser then fair enough, but they didn't. They took that market by using their monopoly. That is illegal and in the end the customer lost out big time. Microsoft stopped development once they won the browser war. And developers had extra work on their hands developing websites that were W#C compliant and worked on IE which wasn't compliant. Thankfully we have the EU to correct this injustice. The Bush Administration was paid off by donations to the Bush campaign to the tune of 50 million I think it was.
BTW, have you ever noticed how sometimes IE will fully display a page, then throw up a pop-up that says IE can't display the page. Then when you click CLOSE on the pop-up, the whole page goes blank. Go figure.
Also, in the CNET article the other day about Microsoft's smartphone software, IE would only display the bottom half of the screen shots. Firefox displayed them just fine.
See what you're missing by sticking with IE. :-)
Same thing for Chrome, which I am testing and reporting bugs in it to Google as I find them.
Just using Firefox or another browser is NOT a panacea for virus problems..... unless you are talking about ActiveX viruses. THOSE only creep up with IE, though Microsoft has fixed many of the problems by having those things ONLY install on your system if you ask them to since XP SP2.
Just using Firefox or another browser is NOT a panacea for virus problems..... unless you are talking about ActiveX viruses.
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Shall we try thinking? Be open to all viruses, or close yourself off to some (many?) of them?
Why can't winblows apologists listen to themselves?
Maybe if Mozilla made a product that was worth something, they wouldnt have a problem combating MS in this space. Perhaps, most people just dont care. If I buy a Windows System, I am free to download Firefox, but I choose not to since IE works just fine for me. Mozilla, Do the world a favor and just keep working, updating, improving firefox..And just quit your *******!
But IE wasn't the reason Mozilla had trouble, it was their buggy browser.
The first couple of versions of IE were not as good as what Mozzila was offering.
Microsoft threw the best minds money can buy at the problem and came up with a far more stable and capable browser.
By IE4 Mozilla was about 50 computer science PHDs behind.
How could they compete?
Hackers stepped in and exploited the "helpful" features of IE - like active X - and pretty much attacked Windows through IE.
Meanwhile Mozilla has a product that is far too primitive to access the OS through the browser. So as the technically inept masses clicked on any pop-up in front of them Mozilla was hardly affected - and gained market share.
I'm glad that there is a separate non-Microsoft browser.
I lock down IE and kill the annoying advertisements.
When I need to see a page that uses the predominant advertising plug-ins I temporarily use Firefox . . . then go back to happily browsing static pages in IE.
"Mitchell Baker: 'WAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!'"
Cody
To paraphrase: "We libertarian-minded folks in the OSS community refuse to pander to the lowest common denominator of user... until, of course, those proletarians don't adopt our products, in which case we'll insist on government intervention to *force* them to look at our software!
It's also interesting that Opera filed the complaint, Mozilla jumps on board and gets all the press.
As a FIrefox user, I've lost a lot of respect for the Mozilla foundation. If this is how Mozilla plans to get ahead in the future, I can't see myself continuing to support them. I can only hope Mitchell Baker makes a swift exit from her post as chairman.
If we somehow get to the conclusion that anti-trust law now covers "marketplaces" of items with no intrinsic monetary value .... how is it Microsoft's fault that some other company's free software is unknown to a large segment of the general public? It's Microsoft's fault because they built a product that millions upon millions use? I thought that was the point of capitalism? Do we expect that Microsoft should build advertising campaigns touting the products of other companies? When would Microsoft be absolved of their responsibility to provide free services to their competitors--before or after they put themselves out of business with the brilliant marketing/distribution plan they've developed for those poor other companies?
Would it be a fair market if an oil company bought Pepsi and used its oil profits to give away free Pepsi at all the stores where Coca-Cola was sold, say for a year? And then when Coca-Cola and all of the other cola producers went out of business, would it be a fair market to stipulate that if you wanted Pepsi, its availability would only be made available to you if you bought a full tank of gas?
The central tenet of capitalism is competition. If you take away fair competition and allow participants to cheat, capitalism and its ideals will no longer thrive nor exist. So, don't go using "capitalism" to defend Microsoft. They are one of the most non-capitalist companies in existence because whenever possible they try (or have tried) to cheat the competition and manipulate the market rather than have their products compete in a fair market and have the market decide which product is best.
People would buy the computer with Windows preinstalled including a browser which meant that the other browsers, paid at the time of this happening, could not compete.
Fast forward to today, browsers are now free for the most part. However, the damage has been done. People buy a PC and expect to see Windows (the reason people return Linux is because it's not Windows, not because it's not good). When someone sees Windows, they expect to see IE. For the most part, a person who buys a computer will use IE because it's there, not because it's good.
A better product can only take you so far if your competitor has already invaded every computer before you get the chance to make the pitch.
Imagine every home coming with a Hoover vacuum cleaner to clean your carpets. Who would ever buy a Dyson if you already have a vacuum?
I think the point is, that they are only giving customers one choice. There is a high degree of lock-in between IE and Windows that just isn't going on with Safari, Opera, Chrome, or Firefox.
Finn.no
http://labs.finn.no/blog/stor-oppslutning-om-ie6-initiativet
Twitter:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ie6
That Norwegian Guy:
http://thatnorwegianguy.com/norwegian-ie6-spring-cleaning/
look at all the boys and girls fighting now =.=
why do some ppl keep on saying if u cant remove ie its bad, if ie is so tightly integrated with the os its bad.... the danm thing isn't even using 0.5% of the systems memory and if u use another browser u'd still be secure. and lets not forget having multiple browsers actually helps if one of them breaks down. hell ive had instances where i needed ie to get back online because firefox broke and needed reinstalling or some googling for help. and really, complain to the developers about this issue of standard, i dont know it looks to me as if someones tries to create some thing else thats not standard u ppl say its innovation unless its ms doing it, i dont know it just seems that way.
o and seriously, i had quiet a bit of respect for mozilla until i saw this article, brainwashing? thats a joke, hell if this was brainwashing then sony's walkman and apple's ipod would be brainwashing too, felt like baker had a personal vendetta. don't forget new comers always have a tougher fight, if firefox was around before netscape was around i believe things would've been different.
Using another browser, ANY other browser, makes you inherently safer all by itself. Consider the tight integration to the OS and then look up ActiveX to see why.
While you're educating yourself, look up Mozilla's past again. You missed a critical point there too.
"why do some ppl keep on saying if u cant remove ie its bad, if ie is so tightly integrated with the os its bad..."
learn to read, I didn't say u can remove it, ur the one showing ignorance
and really, if u have continue to say someone else needs education by not reading comments right u are the one that needs an enducation
- by RAMWolff February 19, 2009 6:47 PM PST
- I have been using Mozilla Firefox for years now. It's not perfect but I think it's much more useful than IE, Opera, Chrome or that horrid looking thing called Safari (I use Windows Vista Home Premium and Win 7 beta) It's really easy to back up your Firefox and move it to different computers. There is a very useful program called MozBackup, current version that I have is 1.4.8 you can find it here: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ it can back up, successfully the extensions as well. I did this with both migrating my Firefox from XP Pro to Vista and then again to Win 7 without any issue what so ever. I hope this gal gets the ball rolling on "leveling the playing field". Sure Windows wins because, well, they do make the operating system but this isn't about the OS, this is about choice of browser and there is no reason why we all can't play on the www using the tools that best suite our desires and needs.
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(54 Comments)Peace!