bitsifter
friday, october 4

[rant] The Dad has been building a house for almost two months now. The two-story structure already existed, being built for a family business that recentlydisbanded for richer jobs in the Silicon Valley. As part of the clean-up, he removed all of the phone network cables which connected the computers of the business and, in the process, disconnected the computer I'm currently typing on from the Internet.

The computer feels dead now. Without telnet, e-mail, and web service, the machine falls from slick network computing device to loud, bulky typewriter. One would ask, "Why not just use your modem" to which I'd respond "Modems are dead."

Rest in Peace, Hayes.

The teen years of the Bitsifter were spent surfing the web of the 1980's, the bulletin board systems. Bragging rights were still based on bandwidth, we simply replaced T-1, T-3, or ISDN with 300, 1200, or, 2400 baud. We spent frustrating evenings figuring out how long we'd have to save to buy that Winchester 5 megabyte hard drive, but we were among the first to recognize the new communication medium formed by a network of computers.

The means to connect those computers were the modems. First, the Hayes 300 baud handed down from the Dad, then the 1200 baud one for Christmas, and finally the 2400 baud purchased with money from the first job.

Modems peaked at 28,000 baud in the late 90's and Hayes was still right in the fray, but the Internet suddenly replaced modems with network cards and TCP/IP. The sigh of relief breathed by 3Com was heard across the Silicon Valley.

Hayes has many good years ahead. The de-facto connection to the net will remain to be a modem for most of the world until the turn of the century when anyone with cable TV with have instant access to more bandwidth than they'll know to deal with. Meanwhile, at work in corporate America, I no longer received a modem as part of my standard machine configuration.

[rant] The press of the technology industry thrives on staging battles between Microsoft and any company which has what Microsoft does not. The current battle of the browsers remains mostly a term coined by the press which is conveniently supported by Microsoft. To understand it, let's go back to the previous war...

1989, Borland and Aston-Tate own the database market and the world is moving to Windows. Rumours of a failed Windows database product called Omega at Microsoft only buoy the development of product code-named Piranha, Paradox for Windows.

1996, At a recent team meeting, when it is mentioned that I've purchased Paradox 7.0 for Windows 95, a co-worker says, "You know it's a dead product, right?"

Hind-sight explains what happened,

1) Legacy support: Paradox for Windows did not support the thousands of existing Paradox for DOS applications. I guarantee that a majority of these Paradox for DOS applications are still in use.

2) Feature mayhem: Paradox for Windows(and dBase for Windows, for that matter) were the be-all end-all development platform for database applications. Borland created an amazing product that provided such a complex feature set along with an object-oriented language that even long time Paradox developers were assualted by the learning curve. Microsoft Access was a far less complex tool -- where Paradox developers would spend months getting an application together, Access had developers up in weeks with, albeit less sophisticated applications, but ones which worked.

3) The time and price are right: There was a five month period when only Access was available on the market and, borrowing a page from Borland's Quarttro Pro marketing plan, Microsoft was selling a $795 product for $100. They flooded the channel and Paradox never caught up.

The web browser war is a different battle,a different product, but let's apply the same three points,

1) Legacy support: Until recently, Netscape defined what a HTML page was. Microsoft has stepped up the battle and now both vie for the ear of the WC3 Consortium, but neither gains by ignoring the features of the competitions browser.

2) Feature mayhem: Both the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are easy use and relatively stable as long as the mind-boggling array of add-ons, plug-ins, and utilities don't corrupt the usability of the overall product.

3) The time and price are right. Netscape had more than a year lead on Microsoft and it forced Gates to once again follow the lead of his competition, this time giving his browser away for free as well as drastically reducing the price of any Internet related product -- this will eat into Microsoft's botton line more than most will admit. Meanwhile, Netscape continues to reap in the benefits of a strong brand-name while making major in-roads on selling corporations on their intranet server software.

Several flaws here: The comparison between a database and a browser is weak -- the variety of information which a database application must wrangle is much less than that of a browser which will rapidly become part of the operating system. Also, Microsoft has more money than God. In the time it takes to determine whether Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot, if Netscape is still around it is unlikely to resemble the current company.