July 1st, 2011 at 6:23PM
The implications of the propriety vision were not good. In Gates and Ellison’s minds, the corporations who owned the Information Super Highway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish” as Microsoft’s then Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold referred to it at the time. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Super Highway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his co-founder Jim Clark originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Super Highway, not the Internet. It wasn’t until deep into the planning process that they decided that by improving the browser by making it secure, more functional and easier to use, they could make the Internet the network of the future. Marc and Jim called the first Netscape browser Mozilla—meaning Mosaic Killer—to emphasize the mission to replace Mosaic and its importance. Today, if you type about:Mozilla into a Firefox browser (the Netscape derivative browser project), you still see the religious zealotry with which the team pursued the mission. On the modern Internet, we all benefit from that passion and commitment. Had Netscape not succeeded so quickly and forced Microsoft into the browser war and out of their proprietary network agenda, the world likely would be quite different. Even if the Internet had eventually won, it would have taken much longer and the world would have lost years of important innovation. And we all would have paid many vigorishes in the meanwhile. — Why the Browser Matters // ben’s blog
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