Regular readers know I don’t have much use for Microsoft. They dominate the desktop through marketing and inertia, not technical merit. But I’ve been thinking about the relative positions of Internet Explorer and its competitors, and I think we should be glad it’s out there.
Internet Explorer is a classic case of how Microsoft behaves in the market. They’re like Wal-Mart; undercut your competition until you drive them out of business, and after that it doesn’t matter if quality slides. Microsoft was pretty aggressive about developing IE until they finally crushed Netscape, which happened with IE6. Now, IE6 was arguably crap. It was the Windows Vista of browsers; sort of a halfway product. You could see what they were aiming at, but they hadn’t quite arrived there yet, and it had all sorts of rough edges and missing features and security holes and things that weren’t quite kosher, by which I mean not following the HTML standard. But because they had eliminated their primary competition, they could afford not to care about that, and indeed IE’s flaws and inconsistencies became the standard web developers had to code to. They had little choice in the matter, and since Microsoft had achieved market dominance with a free product, they let IE rest and never got around to fixing the flaws.
This created an opportunity for open source, and the Firefox developers stepped in to fill it, catching Microsoft flat-footed. They never expected they’d get competition from another free product. But Firefox was so much better than IE that it had two effects on the market: 1) It forced Microsoft back to the coding bench to finally fix some of the more egregious problems in their browser, and 2) It divided the online world into two tiers. People who knew what they were doing used Firefox (or Opera, and later Chrome or Safari or other Webkit browsers). People with no technical savvy stuck with IE. It is this latter development that earns Microsoft some left-handed thanks.
Most of the web is free. There are some pay sites that make money directly, primarily porn sites, but for the most part, websites that exist for profit are paid for by advertising, not by customers directly paying for access. (By websites that exist for profit, I mean that the site content itself is the business; I don’t mean online commerce sites like Amazon.) Banner ads, popup ads, promotional toolbars, chunks of ads running down the sides of the page. Who reads these ads and buys from the advertisers? Primarily IE users. Firefox has excellent ad blocking plugins available, and they are widely used. Such things exist for IE too, of course, but the Firefox user base is more technically savvy and more likely to find and use them.
I run Firefox on Linux and I rarely see ads. It’s actually kind of a shock when I see someone surfing without an ad blocker; it’s like being on a carnival midway, with shouting barkers and a bright flashy colorful riot of come-ons. But if you think about it, I’m getting my relatively controlled and sedate internet experience on the coattails of the vast majority of less sophisticated internet users, who buy a computer with Windows and use IE exactly as it comes out of the box. They watch the commercials and underwrite the free content for me. And of course, the advertisers know this, and spend the bulk of their development efforts in getting more ads onto the IE systems and not caring much about the Firefox freeloaders.
As long as IE remains the dominant browser, this will continue to work for advertisers, and the content they subsidize to get eyeballs on their ads will remain available. But if ad-unfriendly browsers like Firefox became the norm, they’d either have to code their way around that, or move to a different business model that didn’t involve free content in exchange for ads that no one would want to pay for because nobody would see them.
So, thanks, Microsoft, for bringing a bunch of rubes to the carnival to throw baseballs at the milk bottles for a dollar a try, while the rest of us just walk around for free watching the show. We appreciate it. Keep ‘em coming.
I think there’s a weakness in this: I myself was once a rube who ran Windows, including OE and IE, out of the box. (I then graduated to being a rube who ran OSX including Safari and Entourage out of the box, though I use TBird as my main mail client now.) In 12 years of being aforesaid Windows rube, by the way, I never got malwared — it can be done, it’s mostly a PBKAC. And in this period, I was an involuntary witness of lots of ads, as I still am on Safari (will look into blockers today, I promise). But I never bought anything, and I never will. That everyone who buys something from an online ad is a IE user, fair enough. But it doesn’t follow that all or even most IE users buy stuff.
You’re reversing the proposition. I didn’t say that all IE users buy stuff; I said most people who buy stuff are IE users, which is quite different. “Who reads these ads and buys from the advertisers? Primarily IE users.”
To pull some numbers out of the air for illustration, let’s say IE users buy stuff at ten times the rate of Firefox users. This could be true even if only 1% of IE users actually buy anything; the Firefox users’ rate would then be 0.1%.
All true, but I thought I detected a sort of caste disdain that implied that the more general proposition might be valid too.
Personally, I think that people who read online ads and buy their products are simply a different species, who, even if (forcibly?) equipped with Linux boxes would want to continue doing so. (That’s my kind of caste disdain if you like.)