Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft

Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by ams6110 on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:00PM (#4623869)

And I never saw it this way... IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser, and Windows is still the dominant PC OS, but IE has fallen from its top position because competing browsers are better. Microsoft's so-called "monopoly" on the desktop did not prevent competition; you could always easily install a different browser, and now that the alternatives are better than IE, people are doing that.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by code_duck on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:21PM (#4623905)

So, when Microsoft execs were talking about choking Netscape and 'cutting off their air supply', they meant by making a better browser, you're saying?

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by mgkimsal on Sunday October 07, 2012 @08:23PM (#4624939)

The air supply was a reference to revenue stream, iirc. Early on Netscape charged for their browser, and also charged for other products around it (NS Server, etc). I think even by the time they got to giving away the browser for free, it was seen as a bit of a 'gateway' product to other paid NS products. Those were threats to MS as well (or were perceived to potentially be).

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by yuhong on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:46PM (#4623985)

Yea, remember that it also affected Opera too.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by true_religion on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:23PM (#4623911)

> IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while

That's right. IE was free. Netscape was not. I think this is a point a lot of people miss.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by josephlord on Sunday October 07, 2012 @06:48PM (#4624701)

It was free too pretty soon after IE reached OK though if I remember rightly.

Netscape did crash far too often though in that time period and was probably better even beyond all the made for IE websites.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by saraid216 on Sunday October 07, 2012 @05:16PM (#4624478)

I... actually didn't know that Netscape was a bought product until just now.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by mikeash on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:48PM (#4623995)

Regardless of the merits of IE, or lack thereof, the point is that it doesn't matter if you get up to anticompetitive behavior similar to what MS was accused of unless you actually have a monopoly on something.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by enraged_camel on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:23PM (#4623915)

>>IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser

Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. They did so because it came installed by default on their computer and most of them were too lazy/ignorant to find alternatives. Heck, most people didn't even know what a browser was. They just knew that double-clicking that blue e icon allowed them to get on the Internet.

IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by rimantas on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:34PM (#4623945)

  > Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was
  > "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was.

You don't know what are you talking about. IE4 was already better than NN4 with its "layers" and half-assed JS-based CSS implementation. IE6 was far far ahead of Netscape. It was the best browser at the time. The problem is that IE stagnated from that point.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by winter_blue on Sunday October 07, 2012 @02:41PM (#4623968)

> The problem is that IE stagnated from that point.

Recently, they've caught up pretty well.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by te_chris on Sunday October 07, 2012 @03:32PM (#4624162)

That they had to catch up is the real problem. They willfully stagnated for years.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by nostrademons on Sunday October 07, 2012 @03:06PM (#4624070)

I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater until 2000. I finally gave up NS4.7 for IE5.5 then, because Netscape wouldn't work on a large number of pages on the web. It would hang on their Javascript, or misrender page layouts.

I'm still a Microsoft hater, but IE did win because it was better. Netscape totally dropped the ball on that.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by CamperBob2 on Sunday October 07, 2012 @07:04PM (#4624736)

Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was.

It damned sure was. The browser game was Netscape's game to throw away. And sure enough, they did just that with 4.

None of the browsers shipping today have anything to do with the browsers that were shipping in the NS4/IE4 era.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by yuhong on Sunday October 07, 2012 @10:46PM (#4625290)

And more importantly cancelling Mariner which was going to be Netscape 5.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by BarkMore on Sunday October 07, 2012 @03:22PM (#4624119)

IE4 and IE5 were:

* Faster than Navigator.

* Had more features than Navigator, DHTML being the most important.

* Were highly compatible with content written for Navigator.

Navigator ran on more platforms. So yeah, if you were not running on Windows, Navigator was superior.

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Re:Robert Bork on antitrust: Google is no Microsoft by WalterBright on Sunday October 07, 2012 @09:41PM (#4625145)

I can vouch for IE being far better than Netscape.

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