A piece I wrote for

A piece I wrote for Guardian Unlimited last week, on a possible fresh bout of browser wars, prompted quite a bit of mail from readers who complained I'd missed out the well meaning, if still slightly buggy Mozilla and Opera browsers. One gentle reader even accused me of "bending over" to those filthy Americans and their software. Evidently, the browser war continues to get a lot of people worked up. So it makes this kind of quote, from a Wired News piece today on AOL's possible switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to its own Netscape broswer, all the more surprising. Wired writes: "Analysts who follow both companies seem at a loss to find a strategic advantage to the pending switch. 'AOL may just like throwing money at ways to rid itself of any ties to Microsoft,' said Kenneth Smiley, director of research for Giga Information Group. 'But, in this instance, AOL has been unable to articulate a reason why it is in the best interest of AOL subscribers and AOL itself to make this move.'" Umm… what? Let's go back in time here… the reason Microsoft piled into the internet browser game was because Bill Gates spotted that the browser had the ability, in the future, to bypass - or at least marginalise - the operating system. "A new competitor 'born' on the Internet is Netscape," he wrote in a now famous memo in May 1995. "Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client [browser] to commoditize the underlying operating system." What he was saying was: if a super browser of the future could do everything an operating system could (or at least replicate its major functions) why bother with Windows? Gates, of course, was spot on then, and the same wisdom is still good for today. AOL knows that, to exercise real control over what its customers experience online, and to maximise profits, they need to control both the content on AOL, and the means of distribution (browsers, even the cables). It's a tried and tested model - just ask Rupert Murdoch how well it works with Sky TV. So it certainly makes strategic sense for AOL, which will finally own a browser good enough to bring in-house the means by which its users view its content. For consumers, the benefits are less clear - this is, after all, just another big ugly corporation piling into the market, rather than the victory for the little guy that's being painted in some quarters, and the new Netscape is not any better than the latest Internet Explorer. But it's still better to have two ugly corporations fighting it out, rather than one dictating what happens next.