Steve Ballmer: Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Anyway, TC is not journalism, it's a blog.
That's true, but basically irrelevant because "real journalists" (by that definition) are only slightly more common than unicorns.
And it's irrelevant even wrt real journalists because the significant value that they actually add is their "scoop". If readers don't care, if they're satisfied with the reprinted press-release, ....
Yes, and ordinary people are allowed to step within 200 yards of schools. Other people, those tried and found guilty of certain crimes, are not.
I despair that even tech journalists can't grasp the basics of what is one of the biggest tech news stories of the last twenty years.
Their bundling of IE with Windows, however "strategically right" it was, was also an abuse of monopoly power. And they were convicted of it.
"We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free" - Paul Maritz
"We're giving away a pretty good browser as part of the operating system. How long can they survive selling it?" - Steve Ballmer
1) Why did the court consider motivations to be important in the US v Microsoft antitrust case? The body of law and precedent requires that it does, in this case. Though I am not a lawyer, a quick google search found a key phrase in Judge Jackson's Conclusions of Law document: "once it is proved that the defendant possesses monopoly power in a relevant market, liability for monopolization depends on a showing that the defendant used anticompetitive methods to achieve or maintain its position."
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm
That last phrase "to achieve or maintain its position" may involve the consideration of motivations. Otherwise, a defendant might say "we weren't dumping our product; we were merely giving our customers more for less!" The discovery of telling quotations such as the two above would give lie to such a defense, and this is why the "cut off their air supply" quotation was considered so carefully during the proceeding. That document is very interesting to read. It discusses motivations in several places.
2) Why does it matter today, now that browsers are (for the most part, Opera and others excluded) free?
Well, I guess it's really the Consent Decree and the Rule of Law that makes it matter today. If the terms of your divorce say that you're not allowed to see your ex-wife's children, it doesn't matter if 8 years have passed and you have since stopped drinking. You must abide by the terms of the decree to avoid contempt of court.
I said "8 years" in the above example, because that decree became effective in 2001. It's interesting to note that there was a prior decree in 1995, and Microsoft did actually have to go through a contempt of court proceeding for not being in compliance with its terms:
You'd be surprised at how many people still use Yahoo for search.
Google is buying a placement (they pay Mozilla and probably Apple). This really doesn't do much in the way of restricting the activities of other search players. Google is more likely to get themselves in trouble with the FCC over Google Voice.
Apple does not have the market share to matter. There are plenty of phones and Apple's share is tiny compared to someone like Nokia. Restricting the types of apps for a closed system hasn't got anyone in trouble yet, since you have to do a lot of logic leaps / market segmenting to get to a monopoly position for Apple. Heck, the iPod and iTunes are nowhere near monopolies.
Microsoft, in order to protect Internet Explorer (product A), charged higher prices on Windows (product B) to OEMs that wanted to include Netscape Navigator. This is an illegal tying of products. It is considered a restriction of trade. Given Microsoft's market share (and probably, sadly, Microsoft's at that time low contributions to political parties), this is major league anti-competitive behavior. Tying of unrelated products is the problem.
As a side note, I get that you are trying to prove a point with the logic "everyone does it, so it is fine", but I am neither fond of that particular phrase nor do I believe it is true for that matter.
Emphasis on "possible".
People like picking on MS because they believe in their heart of hearts that it was some evil on MS's part which led to IE becoming the dominant browser, but that is not so. At the crucial moment MS had the better browser (IE 4 vs. Netscape 4), I made the switch myself to IE when nobody else was using it because it was a better experience (I currently use chrome for the same reasons). At a time when Netscape was bloated, slow, unstable and had serious usability problems, IE was faster, more stable, and had a better UI. MS bundled their browser with their OS. And, even more importantly, Netscape went into a phase of directionless thrashing around. We know now that they rewrote their code base for NS 4 for no reason whatsoever. They continued to churn their code for several years with no noticeable improvements to the core browser functionality. People tend to forget that Netscape effectively died at the height of the browser wars. They screwed up so bad that they dumped the browser on the open source community, which spent several years cleaning up the code until it finally turned into a decent browser.
But by then Netscape's failure and MS's success had already cemented IE as the dominant browser, at the time.
But despite IE's bundling there is today again a healthy competition amongst browsers. Firefox has a sizable marketshare with chrome, safari, opera and others as viable alternatives. Solid proof that with a better browser it's possible to compete against bundled browsers.
The interesting thing about the browser wars is it's one of the few occasions when history was written by the vanquished.
> “There’s a great deal of commonality,” Schmidt said. “Eventually they may merge even closer.”
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome...
[1] "I think that’s a little tougher for them now because they basically tell the hardware community Android is dead, Chrome is the thing or maybe Chrome isn’t the thing. Maybe it is Android. The cacophony there is probably helpful to us in the grand scheme of things and I don’t know why they would have chosen to do it, at least the way you read the press. It probably has a lot to do with internal squabbles, but I just don’t know."
Android and Chrome are not Google's core business. I do not believe they truly expect to take the lion's share of the OS market from Microsoft.
However, Ballmer is obviously spending a lot of time thinking about them. By forcing Microsoft to focus on defending their core product, they are distracting them from attacking in new markets. Resources focused on defending Windows are resources not spent on competing with Google search, for example.
Joel describes the general idea here:
If that means making a better browser so people will be more comfortable on the web and spend less time loading pages, Google gets more revenue.
If it means making a good mobile OS so people spend time on the web from their phones, Google gets more revenue.
If it means their competitors improve their products to make people happy to spend more time on the web, Google gets more revenue.
Improvements to IE is more ad impressions/clicks for Google as people will be inclined to spend more time and visit more sites online. It's not even about IE "running" Google software as much as it is improving the Internet, which is where Google ads display.
Say, like Apple, Steve?
IE simply doesn't cut it with js speed/stability etc
Wikipedia: Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
Google doesn't care whose browser is used, they care about a sane foundation on which to deploy web apps. Steve shouldn't sound so hurt, it's not as if the entire industry hasn't been "asking nicely" for years to have IE catch up. They can't cry now that someone has taken them by force.
Steve also goes into all the wonderful things happening in IE8 and beyond. And they're irrelevant, for the same reason: IE6 is still the breaking point. Any "innovation" in IE that doesn't come in the form of a free update to IE6 that works on XP, doesn't matter.
Who wouldn't protect their own market share? I don't think any startupers will welcome a new thing that takes over their business slowly. When it's on a small scale it makes up a good story when it is global it's war. Good for the consumers though.
ballmer also said that the iphone would get absolutely no market share at all. i doubt even he believed that.
the practical upshot is that you can't trust high-tech ceos to tell you which way the wind is blowing.
IMHO, their strategy to making OS irrelevant by having everything run from Chrome OS might not succeed in the end.
Just one example: Some time ago, I wanted to become more independent from MS and store my files online, so I started to use Google Docs. It's quite usable for home use, but currently, I switched back to my old Office 2000, with the difference that my files are not only on my harddisk, but I share them on the cloud with Live Mesh. This is a some kind of foreplay for the next year, when MS will come with Office 2010 and also Online office. So MS will have both the native windows client and the online application, while Google has only the later. I really don't see how they can compete here.
The danger for Google lies in the fact, that all their online assets are copy-able, and MS are slowly becoming able to achieve that.
Remember Google's users are not its customers, they're its product.
Chrome, firefox, and safari are much, much more likely to be used by the technically elite. These are the people who fix their friends' and relatives' computers, who design and build websites, who write about technology, they have the ability to influence the less sophisticated in browser choice.
More importantly, browsers are free (except Opera), and in the internet age the process of changing your choice of browser is about as difficult as posting to facebook. This makes browser market share potentially highly volatile. Firefox and chrome are slowly but steadily making gains in market share, and firefox is already within striking distance of becoming the dominant browser. There is very much the potential of reaching a tipping point where the featureset of IE becomes so outdated that it no longer becomes a viable browser choice. And if we ever reach that point, and I believe we very well could given the differential in pace of development of firefox/chrome/safari vs. IE, then the entire browser marketshare arena could be turned upside down overnight. One need only to look at the growth in popularity of twitter, for example, to see how fast things can change in the modern internet world.