Jim Barksdale, CEO, Netscape
Here we are on the eve of that “Show of Shows,” COMDEX. I can’t help but reflect that this is most assuredly what P.T. Barnum had in mind when he uttered those famous words about a “sucker being born every minute.”
Actually, I don’t think Barnum said those words. What he said was “people like to be humbugged.”
It was another notorious con man of the era, “Paper Collar” Joe Bessimer, that intoned “there’s a sucker born every minute - but none of them ever die.”
Barnum and Bessimer would be in their element at COMDEX. Never have more suckers congregated in one spot waiting to be fleeced and never have more hucksters been available to do the fleecing. It just keeps getting bigger with each passing year.
It seems only fitting that this conflab take place in the “sin” capital of the universe, Las Vegas.
No doubt the spotlight will be on the center ring this year with a great Catfight shaping up between Microsoft and Netscape. I don’t know how this battle of the browsers will end. There are those that say Microsoft can’t help but win the war because, aft er all, it controls the operating system and is giving away IE 4.0 for free.
Speaking of Microsoft: has anyone noticed that the kid from Redmond is giving away a lot of software? Yelling free software to users is kinda like hollering fire in a crowded theatre. Funny thing is this seemed to start when Bill of Borg met the Internet . Time was, back in the Windows 3.1 days, when there were more than a dozen TCP/IP stacks available. Since the adoption of Windows 95 they have all but disappeared.
Since Microsoft began giving away their Internet Information Server what happened to all the NT Web servers that used to be around? Wham bam, no thank you ma’am, no more commercial TCP/IP stacks or NT Web Servers. Next up is, surprise, Internet Explorer.
By giving away this little darlin’ for free Microsoft is hell-bent on stomping Netscape into oblivion.
To be fair, Netscape captured the browser crown by giving away earlier versions of Navigator but, and it is a big but, Netscape didn’t give away Navigator for commercial use and they don’t own or control the operating system.
So in spite of all the PR coming out of the Northwest these days the only justification for free software on Microsoft’s part is the ELIMINATION OF COMPETITION. Mr. Gates and his merry band are simply not going to be satisfied until Netscape disappears from cyberspace, and that’s reality, virtual or otherwise.
Before you start sending me e-mail and calling me and telling me how wrong I am and trying to convince me that Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian since Mother Theresa I ask you to consider the latest news from the Microsoft front.
Microsoft has just turned their considerable legal talent loose on companies that use the initials NT in their product names. Cease and desist letters have gone out to companies such as letters to NTsecurity.com, ScanNT, Ntrigue, and NTComputers, to name a few, claiming trademark and intellectual property rights.
I wonder where this leaves the government of Taiwan, whose currency is New Taiwanese dollars, NT$, or Northern Telecom? Or how about my old pal Norman Trask?
“State-of-the-art: Any computer you can’t afford.”
So what’s Netscape doing while all this is going on? If competition is good for the soul then Netscape is ready for sainthood. The browser battles have sure given them enough competition to last a lifetime.
Mike Homer, Netscape’s executive VP of sales and marketing, recently announced plans to place Netscape on 100 million desktops. They are unbundling Navigator from the Communicator Suite and partnering up with over 100 firms in the industry to include str eamlined versions of the browser along with Netcaster and basic e-mail clients. “We are going to rain browsers on people and let them make the choice,” said Homer. “We are extremely confident that if we give users a choice they will keep choosing our sof tware.”
There are clear signs that this is going to be a rough road for Netscape. Last year browsers brought in more than $58 million a quarter and accounted for more than 50 percent of their revenue.
This is down to less than $52 million last quarter and below 40 percent of revenue.
To counter this fall from grace Netscape seems to be shifting a significant portion of its business to what the industry calls “low hanging fruit,” media advertising on its web site.
It would seem that enterprise server software would be a natural but with over 130 million hits on its WebPages per day the selling of advertising is just too juicy to miss. Claiming the most traveled site on the ‘Net, the company derived some 19 percent of their revenue last quarter from advertising and partnerships based on that traffic. In the fourth quarter of 1995 this revenue was around $5.8 million and about 13 percent of overall revenues but a quick glance of the second quarter of 1997 shows the numbers to be $36.5 and 27 percent respectively.
Stay tuned for yet another chapter of “The Browser Battles.” I don’t know about you but this would be fun if it didn’t have such far-reaching implications for you and me.
“Obsolete —
Any computer you own.”
For some time now I have been involved in giving testimony before any number of House and Senate committees as well as the US Department of Commerce and the FCC. For reasons of health, emotional, physical and mental I have resigned from this type of work . Never again will I be a party to such insane behavior.
One such committee involves encryption. Specifically issues revolving around the Security and Freedom through Encryption Act. To use the words “security,” and “freedom,” in the same title as encryption seems ridiculous to me, especially in light of some of the provisions being proposed.
Proponents of this nasty little piece of legislation would place severe criminal penalties on people who use unapproved encryption.
In point of fact, one bill being proposed would penalize anyone who simply “thinks” about creating such technology.
Furthermore, there are provisions for hauling you and your bits and bytes into a “secret” court after “secret” hearings and imposing prison sentences on you for talking to the press about those hearings.
In an early draft the accused was only allowed to talk with his lawyer, not even his wife and certainly not the press. Any violation would impose jail time for contempt of court.
Well, I have washed my hands of all this now. In fact I took a nice, long and very hot shower. How come I still don’t feel clean?
“Where do you want to go tomorrow?” Ad copy promoting a Billy Graham appearance.
I have been writing about online education and distance learning for some time now but UCLA and The Home Education Network (THEN) are hard at work taking this concept to new heights. UCLA and THEN now make it possible for anyone with a home computer and a modem to take advantage of the university extension courses. All of the courses are conducted online, allowing students to complete course work at their convenience — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from anywhere in the world.
For the second year in a row students can access papers, exams and assignments through software installed on their computers. Students can log on at any time to download lectures or files from their instructor — but they are also interactive.
Students are encouraged to participate in e-mail discussions and to communicate regularly with their classmates and the instructor.
According to John Kobara, president and CEO of THEN, the online curriculum mirrors the classroom experience. “Students have given us positive feedback about our format — they are pleasantly surprised by the level of interaction with one another, as well as with their instructor.
And you do not have to be a computer genius — you can just log on and focus on your class,” said Kobara. THEN also places a premium on customer service. Its support staff — which includes course managers assigned to individual students — is readily avail able to help them get the most out of their online learning experience.
UCLA boasts that they offer over 4,200 courses in their Extension’s continuing education program and offer choices in teacher education, business and management, and creative writing. To date, THEN has enabled students from 44 states and eight countries to benefit from the resources of UCLA Extension without having to travel to the Los Angeles campus.
If you would like more information visit the following Web sites: http://www.unex.ucla.edu/online.htm and http://www.then.com.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.