October 21, 1996
Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are apparently putting their egos in check and expressing an unflinching desire to adhere to standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, (www.w3.org) and other groups.
"As long as everyone follows some sort of basic rules, it will be healthy for the Web and the Internet," says John Robb, an analyst at Forrester Research. "There's a lot of money to be made in an open environment, but those who keep tight control over their software will not make as much as those who get out on the Web and become part of the standard."
If anyone could be accused of not embracing standards at the start, it would be Microsoft (www.microsoft.com). "When we first came out with Internet Explorer 2.0, we had proprietary tags and extensions. Things we wouldn't recommend doing now," says Kevin Unangst, product manager for Microsoft's browser. "But that was six months ago. We've done an about-face in terms of standards."
Why? "Microsoft is beginning to recognize that the Internet is too big for one company to dominate, and they'll have to partner with a lot of other companies to move things ahead," says Robb. "It has taken them time to see that they could not leverage their existing monopoly in this area."
According to Robb, this revelation has been a bitter pill to swallow for Bill Gates and crew. Microsoft has spent almost $400 million developing and marketing Explorer and only commands 8 percent of the browser market, he says. Of course, Microsoft's new outlook on standards hasn't prevented it from flexing its muscles now and then. In July, it set up the ActiveX Working Group (www.activex.org) to oversee implementation of its open, cross-platform tools for integrating components on the Internet. In addition to Microsoft, which says there are more than 100 members, the group includes Borland International Inc., Digital Equipment Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
The ActiveX Working Group is charged with "formalizing the standardization of ActiveX because on the Internet, it is critical that customers can rely on cross-platform, vendor-neutral standards," says Paul Maritz, senior vice president of the platforms group at Microsoft, in a company release. Yet analysts such as Robb are wary of the dynamics within this particular body. "Microsoft has taken in players that are fairly weak," he says. "Microsoft is clearly the dominant member, and that's going to have an impact on what comes out of the group. Let's face it, the real objective is to get more industry support for ActiveX."
While Microsoft counts thousands of users of its ActiveX technology, its applet maker still isn't as popular as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (www. sun.com) Java. A recent Forrester survey showed that by the end of 1997, Java, which debuted in May 1995, will have been used to create 60 percent of Internet computing applications.
Netscape's (www.netscape.com) situation is less one of joining a new club than returning to the fold. In the slow early days of the Web, Netscape worked closely with standards bodies to ensure the openness of this open platform. But when development and demand began increasing, the standards bodies found it hard to keep up, and Netscape forged ahead on its own. Today, with the pace of new developments slowing to a mere torrent, and with W3C getting its bearings after its start-up jitters, Netscape and the W3C are coming back in synch.
"We've seen a maturation of the industry, to the point where we now have the opportunity to step back and look at how we're doing this," says Carl Cargill, standards program manager at Netscape. "We've been accused in the past of surprising the W3C with releases, not out of nastiness but out of naivete. We don't intend to do that anymore."
One major factor in the slowdown of development releases is the increased size of the user base. "We've discovered that, with 45 million users of HTML [HyperText Markup Language], we can't just tell them we're changing something overnight," says Cargill. "Things can't move as fast as they used to with that kind of installed base. Also, businesses don't change on a dime. They change in response to needs, and until there's a clear and present rationale presented - and a promise that the change will be complementary to other systems - you get resistance."