That's bullshit. IE6 may have sucked, but it didn't hold anything back. As Firefox proved, anyone could have come along and built a better browser and started sucking up enough market share to make it an industry again.
Seriously. They employed anti competitive practices to grab market share from Netscape. Once they had completely obliterated Netscape, they decided to not update IE6 and leave users suffering.
It's like their aim with IE6 was to kill off the web. Or at least make it suck so much that webapps would be delayed for 10 years - which they pretty much achieved. Obviously that was in ms's favor - their business is desktop apps, not webapps.
IE6 created the first version of AJAX. It had browser based drawing primitives ages before anyone else. It turns out that IE filters were capable of CSS transforms all this time and nobody even realized it. IE6 was innovative when it was released, at a time when the competition was simply inferior.
It's unfortunate that it took Microsoft so long to release IE7, and it certainly has caused significant pain, but realize that it's not as black and white as people make it out to be.
If IE6 were holding it back for so long, why did it miraculously stop, even though nothing changed? The answer, of course, is that it wasn't IE6. It was the lack of a business model, which was inadvertently solved by Google.
Saying IE6 held the browser market back is like saying Yahoo held the search market back by giving it away for free. Just like Yahoo, Microsoft is now feeling the pain of failure to innovate.
Of course, everyone here hates IE6 (understandably) and Microsoft so I'll get downmodded a lot.
As I recall, Netscape had a business model back before Microsoft set out to use monopoly power to deliberately destroy it.
Your argument reminds me of the old joke about the guy who kills his parents and then runs around asking for sympathy because he's an orphan.
Of course, it's quite possible that Netscape's original business model was nonviable. There were plenty of silly business models around in the old days. We'll never really know. But this doesn't let Microsoft off the hook: Shooting someone who has a terminal illness is still murder.
That's Netscape. They had a nonviable business model in charging for something that ended up on the roadmap of every platform they were on. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but Apple bundles a browser with their OS for free too, and would have done the same if they owned the market. And then everyone would be complaining that Safari held us all back.
Firefox found a viable business model and the browser wars began again. That's all there is to it.
>> If IE6 were holding it back for so long, why did it
>> miraculously stop, even though nothing changed? The
>> answer, of course, is that it wasn't IE6. It was the lack
>> of a business model, which was inadvertently solved by
>> Google.
I don't think the business model really matters TBH. Firefox would have happened without google.
Maybe you have a point though, maybe people could have tried harder, and "Done a firefox" earlier, and still been able to gain market share. I don't know when all the legal stuff against Microsofts anti-competitive business practices started to get stamped out, but it seemed to be around the same time of phoenix/firefox.
Firefox clearly started happening before they found such a great way to monetize, but I have a hard time believing it would be what it is today with tens of millions of dollars less coming in. Now there's so much money in it that there are multiple decent competitors to IE.
All of Microsoft's settlements seem to have had no impact on their browser strategy really. Every copy of Windows still has IE on it, just like it did before, and requires a download of Firefox or any other competitor. I don't think their "anti-competitive practices" or the cessation thereof have made any difference at all. Hence my original post.
And they sort of succeeded. And that's why they have so much trouble on Europe.
Their grip was so strong they rescued Apple and made it bundle IE in MacOS.