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Technology: View from the top
The accidental entertainer
Rob Burgess wasn't chasing cartoons -- but with Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave enabling a faux broadband experience, he's suddenly tight with Stan Lee.
By John Geirland
[11/15/99]

Direct mail double cross?
A fight over opt-in marketing has anti-spam activists crying foul.
By Deborah Scoblionkov
[11/12/99]

You're_a_Loser.com
Behind (and beneath) every Internet gazillionaire is an army of downtrodden "NetSlaves."
By Janelle Brown
[11/11/99]

The consumer's always wrong
Why else would visitors to consumer rating sites like Deja.com rank Rolling Rock the second-best beer and Alan Keyes the top presidential candidate?
By Mark Gimein
[11/10/99]

Books
The Internet illusion
The Web pretends to broaden our worldview, but really, says "The Control Revolution," we use it to segregate ourselves.
By Thomas Scoville
[11/09/99]

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The Justice Department's antitrust suit and Judge Jackson's finding of fact have focused on how Microsoft used its operating system dominance to wrest control of the Web browser market from Netscape. Perhaps even more significant is the untold story of Microsoft's attempts to corner the Web server market. As someone whose company competes directly with Microsoft, (we sell a Web server called WebSite that runs on Windows NT, and we are active in promoting Perl, Linux and other open-source technologies), I've been privy to some of the not-so-small details that have guided the course of this recent history. And, it seems to me that if it weren't for the work of a small group of independent open-source software developers, the Justice Department intervention might have come too late not just for Netscape but the Web as a whole.

In his findings Judge Jackson made the astute point that the browser is a kind of middleware and, though it uses the features of the operating system, it provides additional "applications programming interfaces" (API) of its own. The most familiar of these aren't APIs like Win32, which describes how to write programs for Windows, but rather languages and protocols like HTML, Javascript and HTTP. Anyone who runs a Web site is intimately familiar with the attempts by both Microsoft and Netscape to turn these open standards to their advantage by introducing proprietary incompatibilities into the version of HTML recognized by their browsers. But the APIs that have turned out to matter don't just reside in the browser.

Judge Jackson's analysis completely avoided the server side of the equation -- and it is the server which has turned out to be the real next-generation platform. When Judge Jackson talks about applications and APIs, he's clearly still thinking about Office-style desktop applications residing on the PC, albeit running in the browser rather than directly on the native operating system. Yet the most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on.

The server side of the Web is the new platform that Microsoft was rightly afraid of.

Next page | The rise of IIS and a Web-server bully