low-end octane2? (was: Re: [rescue] octane question)

[David Passmore]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 06:31:00PM -0500, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:

> Um... IE generally got spanked by Netscape until the 4.x verions
> (on both sides). 

Hence my comment that IE didn't start out as superior to Netscape, but it
ended up that way.

> And of course M$ won that race... they had all the
> money from their desktop monopoly to allow them to develop and give away
> the browser.  Netscape had to give away the browser to compete and
> use their web server sales to support BOTH lines of products (browser
> and server) with the money from their server sales....

I don't buy this argument in the least. No one I know has EVER paid money
for a copy of Netscape, even before IE. If anything, it should have been a
loss-leader to sell more of their application servers. Think about it; no
one ever makes money on clients. However, servers generally can't add
features until clients support them. This makes controlling the client
vitally important and a position to be in at all costs. Netscape was in a
unique position to use, and dare I say exploit this fact, since they were
the leader. They didn't. If Netscape relied on their client as a source of
revenue, they were foolish. Client functionalty is, and I cannot express
this enough, too easy to duplicate. But, without spending the resources to
create a quality client, the server is useless. It's a catch-22, and
something Netscape did not know how to deal with. It is a similar situation
with OSes and applications; people don't buy OSes, they buy platforms to run
their applications on. But the platform still has to be of quality.

Sure, Microsoft has deep pockets now, but that wasn't always the fact. How
did they crush other companies before they had billions of dollars? Pretty
much the way they do now. They have never played by the rules; they stretch
the system as much as they can before it breaks. And believe me, they know
exactly how far that is. I hate to quote Spaceballs, but evil will always
triumph because good is dumb. How much do you think it would hurt Microsoft
if Sun could actually improve and *market* StarOffice, and MS's biggest
revenue stream dropped out from under them? Forget Linux, Sun holds the keys
to putting a major ass-whopping on MS, and what do they do? They sit on it.

Good is dumb.

David