Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)
evgenymorozov.tumblr.com
evgenymorozov.tumblr.com
almost 20 years later, and nothing has changed. I'm trying to buy a specific car, and the Internet knows everything, dealers know nothing. The salespeople and dealers know less about the cars on their lots than the consumers do.
The consumers know about new models before they're even announced; dealers don't know about them until they show up. Dealers can't tell you when a certain car will be built or shipped, you're lucky if they can even tell you when it arrives at port and is on a train or truck destined for their dealership.
I'm spending a lot of time online where "insiders" sneak information about production numbers and ship dates and tracking and so on, and the "official" channels are utterly worthless.
It's amazing, disastrously bad. And we pay for it. I can't way to see the dealership model die.
Microsoft tried and very nearly succeeded in replacing the open web with the ActiveX "information superhighway". If they had done so we might not yet have the smartphone-with-browser, due to the difficultly in implementing competing ActiveX implementations to run on it.
Lots of people making money off the pipes? Comcast.
New mainframe computing model with web apps? That's certainly arrived.
> As an example, I predict that by the end of this year, Microsoft will announce that it has a Visual Basic variant or deviant that it proposes as the Web-client language. And Sun and Microsoft will have a war. And Microsoft will put everything it has into that war, because if it can win, it will have killed Netscape along the way. Netscape will put everything it has into that war, because if it loses, it is in trouble. So I ask you, who will win that war? Probably Microsoft.
Everybody lost. Microsoft built IE6's fortress of incompatibility that it now struggles to get rid of, like that indestructible anti-aircraft tower in Berlin. Netscape went bust and open-sourced everything. Sun folded into Oracle. Java is now the annoying thing that you have to update while avoiding the Ask toolbar in the installer, and many people have banned it too from their browser. VBScript in the browser is dead.
Only Javascript remains.
"We are not going to make any money by selling browsers, and I personally don’t think they are going to make any money from it either. If you can get a browser from Microsoft for free, why are you going to pay $39 to Netscape?"
Netscape, as best i can tell, pretty much seeded the idea of using web tech on the office network.
And this was a direct threat to the market share of MS on that network.
Thus MS rolled out IIS and IE, with the latter working closely with the former (as was the case between Netscape Navigator and Enterprise server).
So in the end the "browser war" was a proxy war for the office network.
They could offer it for free all they want. Similar in the EU, they weren't against them for it being free, and once they stopped bundling it and windows media player, they were off the hook (even though they still offered them for free).
If all Microsoft had done is bundled a free browser with the OS, it would have never stood up in court in terms of anti-trust prosecution. It would have been a laughable case.
What the DOJ got them on, was restraint of trade issues with OEMs, restrictions on API access, deep integration of IE into the OS (lying about being able to remove it), and market place conduct through leveraging their monopoly, leading to (in the DOJ's opinion) harm to consumers. Microsoft also basically taunted the bull in the countless ways they tried to jam the government, the ways they acted like assholes at every turn (including to the judge), the quotes that came out on things they said about competition, etc. They ended up with nearly everyone against them and looked like the ultimate bullies. If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government, and pretend you can stone-wall them.
No, the only reason MS is suddenly bundling more, including Anti-Virus, is because the judgement expired in 2011.
>If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government,
Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons than you do (which they did), you're going to have a bad time. A lot of "careers" were made at the DoJ over this asinine case, that changed nothing for the better.
Bundling was the surface issue, but the antitrust violation was their undue exercise of monopoly power by refusing to let vendors bundle non-Microsoft software and using their Windows-compatible certification program as the stick to that particular carrot.
From Wikipedia on the settlement: "The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[24] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future."
Its kind of amusing that you point to such a "realpolitik" explanation and yet would leave out that the reason it changed almost nothing at all (for better or worse) was that the Bush Administration, which was more MS friendly, came to office at the end of the case, and the Bush Justice Department abandoned any effort toward imposing any significant sanctions.
The DOJ was against them as a result of abuse of monopoly power. Using their market dominance with Windows, they attempted to strangle out Firefox by demanding that their reselling partners would not also bundle Firefox on their Windows-based computers. If they did bundle Firefox, they would lose their Windows certification.
Free = allowed
Bundling = allowed
Monopoly = allowed
Leveraging partner relationships to unfairly disadvantage a competitor = antitrust violation.
Well, it's now been almost 20 years, and Microsoft has still never released what they claimed they were going to release and have us build on top of them.
So yeah, I have no love lost for Microsoft. Yet they're still not as evil as Google.
Nowadays Apple has a policy of banning all other web browsers and even program interpreters from its platform. This isn't really acceptable either, but there doesn't seem to be any prospect of doing anything about it.
Apple's position is essentially that iOS already has a perfectly good JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore) and the security risks of allowing apps to use mprotect/mmap far outweigh the benefits of allowing other JS engines.
Its crazy that even today, diehards continue to misrepresent the DOJ prosecution of MS in the 1990s.
> Do you guys really want to pay for browsers or every single thing in a OS ala carte?
The basis for the DOJ prosecution of MS wasn't that it was illegal in general to include a browser or similar application as an included feature of an OS, it was that it was illegal for a market participant with monopoly power in a particular market to leverage that monopoly power in an effort to monopolize an existing distinct market.
The Herring: But if Navigator is platform-independent, and…
Jobs: But everybody uses Windows. Come on – 90%+ of the people use Windows, so 90%+ of the people are going to hook into the Internet using Microsoft. Now, you know me, I love the Mac too, but I am trying to be really objective here.
At that moment Microsoft only had: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2
Even then, Jobs says: "Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape."
If you came across something like that today it would probably make the DailyWTF
I've yet to meet a Steve Jobs hater who actually understood what the guy did.
The steve jobs hate is all ideological and comes form the Apple hate which comes from people getting sold PCs by pimply nosed kids in the 1990s and being jealous of their friends much superior macintoshes (which fwiw, since the mid 1990s have been cheaper than comparable PCs, yet the myth is spread otherwise still to this day, because you can go buy a tagamochi for $4.99 and claim it's cheaper than a macintosh, and therefore the mac is overpriced.)
So, yeah, you should re-think what you believe about this guy and learn a bit about the real history.
I've been following him since the late 1980s, and he's always been a passionate, compassionate, genuine, honest and opinionated guy.
Edit: I don't like the way he treat his friends, family, staff or even applicants, details you can get by reading the biographies or watching the documentaries as I've said before.
You clearly have an issue with him? It's just interesting to see what that may be and whether it might able to be substantiated.
I'm pretty much done wasting time here wading thru 20 year olds mindlessly regurgitating cargo cultism.
Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.
I stopped being on the net all the time in late '97 when my ISP banned me from the modem pool during prime-time since my Linux box would tie up one of their line 24/7.
Then I got it back again in late '99 when we moved somewhere with DSL coverage (early Nortel 1024/128k "DSL".) I have had high-speed, always on internet continuously since. Currently FTTH at 100/30m.
So Jobs, speaking in 1994 about average consummers, was right. Late '90s / early '00s saw ubiquitous DSL/Cable take over as the dominant access technology. Obviously iPhone brought always online to the mobile phone market later.
At the time of the article, you had trouble getting a computer with a TCP/IP stack on it out of the box. The NeXT machines did, and Macs did, but most people had windows and didn't even have TCP/IP, IIRC
The iMac was the first internet connected out of the box machine.
>> their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world
Replace Netscape with Google and Navigator with 'Chrome'
"For example, it took Federal Express four months to build its Web site – using WebObjects, you could build that same site in four hours."
So, red herring, the standard, fast company, business2.0, wired, others.