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Comment by Prophasi | Hacker News Reader

The market wasn't then, and isn't now, zero-sum.

Microsoft's domination was achieved by making passable-to-excellent browsers in the beginning and putting them on the desktop, which made the web more accessible to millions of people, boosted commerce, and pushed feature development forward much more quickly than Netscape (or any company) would have done absent competition. Bigger market, bigger pie, more investment, more jobs, more consumers.

Netscape died, of course. But it didn't have to be that way; and Microsoft won far more than Netscape lost.

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This isn't how I remember the 90s. I remember Microsoft shipping several versions of laughably bad browsers, while their operating system completely dominated the market. They finally shipped a better browser than NS with IE4, but that has just as much to do with shipping a usable product as it does with NS failing to ship a good product.

That said, in those days the web wasn't yet a big deal, and wouldn't be for another couple of years. I don't see how MS "boosted commerce" at all during this timeframe, either. By the time the web became accessible to the multitudes, and was being used for commerce MS already dominated the browser market.

As I recall, IE3 was passable, not laughable. IE4 was better than usable; as much as I clung to my Netscape Communicator 4, it was better than NS's offering.

In fact, another current HN article right now details all that IE4 innovated: http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/08/22/the-innovations-of-...

IE3 started Netscape's decline, but it really picked up in the couple years after IE4's release (1998-2000).

All that competition, the proliferation of features, the new ecosystems of dev tools, new jobs as companies saw the Internet taking off with MS's weight behind it, the press about the browser wars, being able to click the desktop "Internet" icon on your new computer and see well-rendered and fast websites... to state that none of that actually grew web usage and that MS just took NS's users 1-for-1 is unbelievable to me.

MS made a better browser and put it in front of everyone's face while simultaneously convincing lots of companies to join the fray. The pie exploded.

  > The market wasn't then, and isn't now, zero-sum.

How many desktop operating systems are normal people going to use? Operating systems don't tend to be complementary (people running multiple OSes and desktop VMs are the exception, not the rule... especially back in the 90s).

For desktop, probably only one, but who uses "desktop computers" any more?

Now that your phone, your music player, your computer, your notebook, your tablet, your game console(s), your television and your video playback device all need an OS, I'm guessing the number of operating systems people use on a daily basis is higher than you think.

Now? Yes. In the 1990's? Not so much.

That's not what zero-sum implies; you don't have to run two browsers, or two OSes, to refute it.

The marketshare numbers you see are percentages. Say Netscape has 80% of the market of 1M people, and IE4 is popular enough that NS's share dwindles to 30% as IE's rises to 70%. If we're still dealing with 1M total users, the market is zero-sum in that NS's losses are exactly MS's gains.

My contention is that IE4 was so good for its time that it grew the overall internet market; instead of 1M casual users, we have, say, 5M. If NS's marketshare fell from 80% of 1M to 30% of 5M, their user base actually went from 800K to 1.5M. IE4 killed them in share, but helped the overall market and Netscape in particular, by users and revenue.

To assert that it was a zero-sum game is to assert that the market was inelastic relative to the available browsers, which seems ridiculous. Better browsers = more users.

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