The Open Road

Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?

I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.

Or is it?

The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.

For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:

Internet Explorer market share falling faster than reported?

(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from StatCounter))

That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.

Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."

Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.

Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.

Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.

Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.

Game on.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Apple recently redesigned the tab system for its Safari 4 browser, placing tabs at the very top of the browser screen. As an occasional Safari user, I find the new tab placement confusing. Half the time I forget that the tabs are even there. It seems like much has been given up for very little benefit. Apparently, I'm not alone in my complaints and confusion about the updated tab placement.

Even more confusing to me, however, is why Apple decided to change tabs in the first place. Did you request it? I know I didn't.

This, however, is the point. Apple doesn't ask. Sometimes, this is a very positive thing as Apple has a good track record of redefining the industry standard (e.g., iPhone's touch screen).

But sometimes it's a negative, as here.

Now consider the open-source alternative, Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla is also considering changing the way it does tabs, but it's going about it in a very un-Apple-esque fashion:

It's asking its user community to conceptualize the next generation of tabbed browsing in Firefox.

The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge 2009 is focused on answering the question, "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?" It's an important question, given the central role Web browsers play in computing today, and it's equally important that Mozilla wants to improve the tabbed-browsing experience by looking to its community base, rather than assuming the full burden of design and development itself.

Mozilla, in some ways, is the antithesis of Apple. The open-source bazaar competing against the Apple cathedral, and doing quite well.

Intriguingly, Microsoft probably will fall somewhere in the middle. Microsoft has always been fairly community-oriented, with a thriving partner ecosystem. As Microsoft seeks to revive its sagging (but still strong) browser fortunes, I suspect it will bridge the divide between Firefox and Safari by keeping Internet Explorer (IE) closed, but encourage a community of extensions--open source and proprietary--that will make for a richer browser experience.

This is the approach Microsoft is now taking with its CRM and SharePoint products, and I believe it's a strategy Microsoft will increasingly adopt as it seeks to embrace the best of both open-source and proprietary worlds.

Safari, the ultimate proprietary browser. Firefox, the ultimate open-source browser. And Internet Explorer, the ultimate mixed-source browser?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The Web browser market has been undergoing tectonic shifts for the past six years, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) dropping 10 percentage points in market share every two years while Mozilla's Firefox gains 10 percentage points every two years. These trends are called out by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, and they suggest that as early as January 2013 we could see Firefox surpass IE in market share if the trend continues:

(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from Net Applications))

A larger version of the chart can be found here.

Firefox's growth raises all sorts of questions about how proprietary software vendors can and should compete with open-source products in the future, but for now it creates a massive problem for Microsoft. If Microsoft loses its grip on the Web browser market, will this also injure its efforts to become relevant on the Web?

Dotzler notes that "browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends," which could suggest that Microsoft won't be able to stem the tide rising against IE simply by churning out a better browser. Instead, it may need to turn to plan B.

There is a plan B, right?

I'm not so sure. Historically, Microsoft would have dealt with such a slide in market share by tying products together such that competition was crippled but its market share was protected. With intense scrutiny from Europe and a renewed threat of such from U.S. regulators, Microsoft's wiggle room doesn't allow much monopolistic wiggling.

Microsoft, in other words, may be stuck with good old-fashioned competition, which doesn't bode well for it, as the Net Applications data suggests.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.

Microsoft can't be happy.

As I wrote last week, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share.

The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.

For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it.

Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it.

Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft has a new advertising campaign and, as Gordon Haff of the CNET Blog Network argues, this one has the potential to nail Apple to the wall.

Even as Microsoft tells the open-source world to stop competing with it on price and instead focus on value, Microsoft is blitzing Apple with a new advertisement suggesting that your next laptop purchase should be all about cost.

Microsoft needs something. As recent data from Net Applications suggests, Apple is eating into Microsoft's market share in the operating-system market, even as Firefox chews into Microsoft in the browser market.

Browser Market Share Data, February 2009

(Credit: Net Applications)

The more market share Firefox takes from Internet Explorer, the worse things will be for Microsoft, and not merely in browsers. The browser is the key to operating-system independence: the more applications that one uses in the cloud, exposed through a browser, the less need for Windows, paving the way for Apple and Linux.

Apple's design aesthetic prevents it from putting its weight behind Firefox, but this is short-sighted. Apple needs Firefox to succeed, and it is unlikely to be able to drive as big a wedge in Microsoft's market share with Safari, which, while growing, lacks Firefox's potential.

Of course, what's bad for Microsoft is also bad for Apple. Someone needs to counter Microsoft's clever new ad with a shock to both Microsoft's and Apple's system: why pay $1,000 for a laptop at all when, for the price of a free Firefox download and super low-cost hardware running Linux ($100 or less), you can get all of the power of the desktop and the Web? Hardware and the operating system become afterthoughts, at that point.

But that's not really a marketing message about which either Apple or Microsoft want you to think.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Buried in an insightful Ars Technica article on digital music is this casual throwaway line, "At Princeton, Macs accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of all student computers in 2008."

Forty percent?!? That's amazing. In the general operating-system market, according to Net Applications, Apple commands nearly 10 percent of the personal-computer market, which shows great progress over its formerly anemic market share but which still is a distant second place to Microsoft's 88 percent share.

But that's today. The funny thing about students is that they eventually graduate. With graduation comes jobs, which provide discretionary income to buy more Macs.

Yes, those jobs also often force these former students to "grow up" and use Windows, though this, too, is changing, as BusinessWeek points out.

Assuming that Princeton's Mac market share numbers are even moderately representative of academic adoption of the Mac (and some anecdotal evidence at the University of Missouri suggests the Mac dominates even more than 40 percent of some universities' computers), Apple has a rosy future ahead of it. The more students it graduates, the more Macs it should sell.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

As noted on the Google Operating System blog, an upcoming session at the Google I/O conference highlights an imminent improvement to Google's open-source Chrome browser: extensions.

Google has recently been making Firefox a bit more like its Chrome browser, with improvements to its toolbar for the Mozilla browser that give it a Chrome appearance, but by adding an easy way to develop extensions for Chrome, Google is going the opposite direction: making Chrome more like Firefox, which has arguably been successful largely because of its extensibility.

So when will Chrome follow Firefox's suit? Almost certainly by the time of Google's I/O conference in May, Nicholas Moline suggests. This should significantly heat up the competition between the dueling open-source browsers, Firefox and Chrome, and give users greater choice.

With Google's Chrome browser now topping 1 percent market share in the browser market, according to Net Applications, it still has a long way to go before it can tackle Firefox's 21.53 percent share. But the real loser here is likely to be Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which continues to slide in market share against the open-source browsers.

By adding the ability for developers to improve Google Chrome through extensions, Google is taking a risk that such extensions will slow performance, but it's also making a bet that a tailored browser will win over customers, as it has for Firefox. It's a smart bet, one that Mozilla made with Firefox, to good effect, even while Microsoft's own extension strategy failed to make much of an impact.

Why has Mozilla been successful with extensions while Microsoft has failed? I think that much stems from the nature of the community that each organization is able to create. Microsoft, as a company, can't command the same fervor of community devotion that not-for-profit Mozilla can.

It will therefore be interesting to see if Google Chrome extensions suffer the IE fate. Perhaps Google can manage its growing Chrome community in such a way that its corporate presence is lightly felt, thereby encouraging more community contributions. Or perhaps not.

I suspect that Firefox will continue to win the browser war because of this, but I also believe that Google Chrome, as an open-source project, is going to feel like a better place to develop extensions than IE, thereby encouraging Firefox and Chrome to continue their onslaught on Microsoft's browser market share.

Last year, it seemed that Microsoft was making great gains on the Apache Web server, with Apache dropping from its high of 70 percent of the Web server market to 50 percent.

Since then, however, Apache's market share seems to have stabilized while Microsoft's IIS has been losing share at a steady clip, according to Netcraft market share data and OStatic's analysis thereof.

Web Server Market Share

(Credit: Netcraft)

There are a number of factors for Microsoft's losses, including "more than 2 million blogging sites running on Microsoft-IIS Web sites expir(ing) from the (Netcraft) survey," but the basic trend is that Apache is holding firm while Microsoft is dropping to represent less than a third of the Web server market.

Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.

Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.

I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.

Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.

The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.

No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).

Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.

What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?