Saturday, October 27, 2007

It Was a Very Good Year

When I was twenty-eight,
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for Internet hacks
Who were full of air
With all those flowers in their hair
And it came undone
In nineteen ninety eight.

On June 25 Microsoft released Windows 98 First Edition.

On November 24 America Online announced its intent to acquire Netscape Communications in a stock-for-stock transaction worth US$4.2 billion.

The Browser Wars thus approached conclusion. We all know how much market share Netscape initially had, and how little share Mozilla with all of its derivatives has today.

So whenever I hear all that buzz about how great and awesome and strong and cool and supercalifragilistic Google is, I like to point out that (for whatever strange reasons) history tends to repeat itself.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I like stats, here are current '07 browser market share stats.

IE 63.86%
Firefox 17.40%
Netscape 10.21%
Google Desktop 2.38%
Mozilla 1.40%
Opera 1.87%
Safari 1.05%

IE has been losing over 10% market share every year for the past 3 years. More recently the numbers of people switching to Mac and Linux have gone up as well. Vista proved to be the worst OS by MSFT since ME came out, even Dell and HP forced MSFT to allow them to continue selling new machines with XP since Vista sales had forced loss in the number of new machines being sold. Also notice they sell new machines with Ubuntu preinstalled now.

All great kingdoms fall eventually, some just fall faster than others. History will back that up.