Ages ago, the great antitrust struggle in software was over Microsoft’s practice of tying its browser to its operation system. Also, there was an outcry among competitors (not consumers) over the zero price that MS was charging for IE. The great fear was that IE would have a complete monopoly on browsers and then…do something really terrible. (Some ancient commentary on this: 1, 2, 3)
All of which is to say: Firefox, the browser beloved by geeks the world over–faster, safer, better, as they say–just made it to 100,000,000 downloads. It does appear that here again the market–and that includes Mozilla’s nonprofit arm–has outwitted the fears of the planners.
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This is not at all suprising. The market haters are simply unsatisfied with how “long” it takes the market to adjust. They think that some sort of governmental decreee is necessary to adjust browser market share into equal pieces. They actually think that the same amount of computers would have been sold if a browser was not bundled.
Another factor that is overlooked is that Internet Explorer was indeed innovative when it came out. It was the first to integrate the file manager with an internet browser. Neither Netscape, Firefox, or Opera readily do this even today. And neither of them ever integrated a dial-up wizard to automatically connect to the net.
Yet despite these innovation it can not compete today with other innovations and improvements brought about in firefox such as tabs, extensions, and security enhancements. I don’t even want to get into the brilliant innovations of Konqueror (which is tightly bundled with KDE like IE was with Windows)
The market flows in the path of consumer choice.
Oppression and tyranny from Washington ought to be opposed – whether from DC or Redmond.
“Oppression and tyranny from Washington ought to be opposed – whether from DC or Redmond.”
what oppression & tyranny. a company offers something for free. use it not, your choice.
“Oppression and tyranny from Washington ought to be opposed – whether from DC or Redmond.”
When I bought a used car it came with a scented yankee candle thingy that hangs from the rear view mirror. Was that unfair and anti-competitive to the scented tree thingy manufacturer?
How about the fact that every UNIX/Linux OS that came out between 1995 and 2003 had Netscape freely bundled with it? Was that oppression and tyranny? Surely you would have to think so.
Look at it this way: Microsoft made it possible for people to connect to the internet so that they could download Firefox or Opera, or perhaps to download and install an entirely different OS, like a *Nix distro. It’s a funny sort of tyranny that provides greater access to the competition.
Michael,
The funny thing is that Microsoft allowed you to do that before Internet Explorer. It was possible to just use the freely bundled FTP client to connect to say: http://ftp.netscape.com.
In fact there was a readme or help file that told the user of the many browsers that existed and where they can be downloaded (even before the anti-trust suit).
I hadn’t thought of the rise of Firefox in relation with evidence of the power of the free market to overcome fears such as those of the Microsoft opponents from a few years ago (including John Roberts!). But this is a very good point… Thank you for making this connection – this is yet another example of the way in which the forces of the market can overcome obstacles, which some believe need government regulation to manage.
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