[OT] RE: MS responsible for ecommerce (was Re: [ILUG] New Virus warning)

[Rónán]

On 4/5/00 at 7:37 pm, adam at iewebs.com (adam beecher) wrote:

> Why does everyone immediately jump on the multistorey pony whenever the word
> Microsoft is mentioned? Talk about sensitive. :)
> 
Who, me? :-) 

> > Yeah, right. The Web/Net was going strong without MS, and the commercial
> > applications were obvious long before it appeared on Redmond radar. I
> don't
> > see anything MS did in the Web arena that someone else wasn't doing
> > first, and using their existing database products to manage a ecommerce
> > site is hardly an inspired idea.
> >
> I didn't say it was the web/net, I said eCommerce/eBusiness. But I *do*
> think that Microsoft had a huge affect on the speed of Internet development.
> All you have to do is look at the origins of this email - the virus - for an
> example of that. If Microsoft Outlook wasn't running on so many computers,
> we wouldn't be hearing about it on the news.
> 
And I said 'commercial applications'. I agree with you about the virus spreading
because of Outlook, but it doesn't follow that if it weren't for Outlook, people
wouldn't be using email.

> And I'm not crediting Microflot for their software, I'm crediting them for
> accelerating Internet development as a whole, *together* with things like
> Apache, SSL, Netscape, etc. Yes, Netscape (ok, Mosaic) had the idea first,
> but Microsoft had the placement to hit Joe Soap, and they did - the most
> popular browser now is MSIE, and the second most popular is Netscape --
> running on Windows.
> 
MS didn't have the placement, they had the coffers. I would say that if they
hadn't made IE free, Netscape would still be on top.

> I also said, "Ok, maybe someone else would've done it, but they didn't". And
> they didn't, Microsoft did. So I gave them credit where credit was due.
> Hence the phrase, "Credit where credit is due."???
> 
That's my point - others did, and some long before MS. MS missed the early
success of the Web completely - but once they realised this, they used their
marketing muscle, marketplace strangehold and big warchest to retake the ground
they lost. Much of the software they initially sold for Web purposes was bought
from elsewhere (FrontPage for sure, not sure about IE).