Customer Reviews

Competing On Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape And Its Battle With Microsoft

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a well-written, interesting book. However, in my opinion, it tells only part of the story. It looks at how Netscape formulated its strategy, but not at how (or whether) this strategy was executed.

This is like explaining a football game entirely on the basis of the diagrams that the coaches drew on the chalkboard. What actually happened on the field gets no attention.

For example, the authors claim that one of Netscape's strategies was to leverage Internet standards. However, the reality is that with its browser Netscape thumbed its nose at Internet standards, particularly when it dominated the market. Even today, its browser generally is seen as less compliant with standards than is Microsoft Explorer.

Another alleged Netscape strategy was to "eat your own dogfood," which means using your own products. The reality is quite different. For example, Netscape released a production version of Enterprise 3.0 and kept its own web site on Enterprise 2.0 for several months afterward.

In 1996, a key component of Netscape's web server was something they called LiveWire, which provided scripting and database connectivity. I adopted it for my web site in the second half of 1996. However, after several months of trying to get it to work reliably, we had to abandon it, moving to Java servlets instead.

Meanwhile, as of late 1997 (when I stopped following it), Netscape's web site still had not adoped LiveWire. They let other users suffer with the bugs and problems in LiveWire, while they ran their own site using the older technology of CGI/Perl. That means they spent at least 1-1/2 years in real time (multiply by 7x to get Internet time) NOT eating their own dogfood. In contrast, Microsoft used their competing Active Server Page technology immediately on their sites.

To return to the football analogy, my epitaph for Netscape is that it is a company that told the press and its shareholders that it was aiming to play in the Super Bowl, but disdained to practice blocking and tackling.

While Netscape's executives were formulating these nifty strategies, Sun and Microsoft were getting their code in shape. In my opinion, that is most of the story.

I found their description of the evolving routines at Netscape (and Microsoft) amazingly complete for researchers who had to do the job "after the fact." Indeed, it reads like an ethnography, which I think is the highest compliment I can pay a book that depended on interviews with key participants, rather than actually sitting in on meetings. They really captured the tension, ambiguity, and uncertainty involved in a high growth start up.

The book fits very well with an evolutionary view of how routines & bundles of routines develop within organizations. I recommend it to people interested in evolutionary theory.

The authors supply a cold dose of reality for anyone who thinks that managing a knowledge intensive high growth start is easy!

Wow!!! This stuff is priceless for an exec in the software world. The discipline involved in these places is good (i know, i'm a software engineer in a shoddy operations environment). Not a great business book (like Microsoft Secrets) but a great sector specific analysis of great software development. Any Cusumano book is a must read for the intelligent high-tech exec.

This book gives a good insight on the web browser wars. As times are changing towards global economy and eCommerce corporate strategies for winning the mindshare and marketshare is also changing. This is a good book to learn from the success and mistakes of Netscape and Microsoft. If you are planning to put together a eCommerce strategy for your company you can learn a lot from here

This is one of the best business books I have ever come across. The authors do a great job presenting the redical shift in business strategy made necessary by the speed of the information economy. The book is well researched and strikes a nice balance between being practical vs. academic. My only complaints are that the authors tend to repeat themselves and that the cover is misleading in that the book is basically a case study of Netscape's business strategy, and provides very few revelations regarding it's duals with Microsoft.

"Competing on Internet Time" is about Netscape, the company that brought the world the Netscape browser, became huge and had one of the largest IPOs. Was eventually told and then disappeared. Although, the book only covers the first 2 of these, the bringing the Netscape browser and the becoming huge.

The authors studies Netscape over a significant amount of time and had dozens of interviews on which they base this book The book contains 6 chapter and (my version) contained an important afterword that described what happened after the first version of the book was published. The first chapter is an introduction to the book whereas the last chapter is more or less a "what can we learn from the story" chapter that summarized the earlier made points and tries to give concrete advise based on that.

The second chapter describes how Netscape got started and was how it quickly grew into a rather large company for one that lasted so short :) From the beginning it hired experienced people (especially from a start-up perspective) and it tried to build the organization and infrastructure based on the assumptions that it would be large. This is something I personally question whether this is a good idea as it seems to be the authors assumption that this is a good idea. In fact, throughout the book there are many assumptions about X is good "when in business" which at times felt annoying.

Chapter 3-5 discusses strategy from 3 different perspectives. 3) The competitive strategy, 4) the design strategy and 5) the development strategy. The competitive strategy described the decisions Netscape took on which markets to operate, how to price their products, etc. It kind-of gives the super-senior-management impression where the management of the company had the perfect view and "on purpose" made these decisions, as if you truly have that amount of control over a company. Also, the Judo/Sumo analogies to martial arts, started to annoy me at this time... that is... the authors explained that Netscape used "judo" strategy where they used "the strength of the opponent" to their own advantage, whereas Microsoft could use "Sumo" strategy because they are big. These analogies felt unrealistic to me (very business-school like, which isn't a surprise considering the authors are business school professors)

Chapter 4 and 5 talked a bit more about the technical decisions made (e.g. the support of Java) and how they were right or wrong and about how the company actually developed the product. The chapters are interesting, yet they reflect very strongly that the authors actually don't have much technical skill and seem to be unaware of what happened on a code level within Netscape or how the company was managed on a low-level. In fact, these chapters feel somewhat contradicting to posts on the internet from ex-Netscape developers who "left the sinking ship". Still, most of the information was summarized from the interviews which made it still an interesting read.

That brings me to the conclusion. In retrospect, a book about how the company and strategy of Netscape works is amusing as the company was bought and most of its technology (meaning the software) has ceased to be used... all, the client, the servers and the web-site. Of course, Netscape did give us technologies that are still in active use, some positive like Javascript and some which I'd rather wish they would have never gone that road, like LDAP. Most of the book describes Netscape as this great and successful company which, on the long-term, turned out to be untrue. That said, Netscape is an interesting company to learn from and the book gives probably one of the best pictures of how Netscape worked. From that perspective, it was definitively an interesting read. Unfortunately, there are so much "business school" assumptions that makes reading the story of Netscape every now and then... difficult. Also, the lack of technical knowledge of the authors was (for me) fairly obvious and made the quality of certain chapters a lot worst. In conclusion, not a bad book, yet not a book I'd quickly recommend unless you want to know exactly what happened to Netscape (and even then, I suggest to supplement the book with other sources such as posts and reports on internet. Therefore, 3 out of 5 stars.

Netscape used to own 90 percent of market share for browsing the internet. The company believed that the browser could replace the operating system. This was a direct threat to Microsoft, which attacked it head on, and destroyed Netscape's dominance. Netscape did not place much emphasis on building relationships with other individual companies. Potential partners viewed Netscape as arrogant, unwilling to listen, and only interested in short-term gains.

Most PC software is distributed through two channels:

1) Computer OEM channel which includes companies such as Dell, IBM, Compaq. The software is preloaded.
2) Internet

Netscape had a disadvantage compared with Microsoft because Windows is the default choice for PC users. Since Netscape did not have strong relationships with partners such as Dell, it had to distribute its software via the Internet. When Microsoft placed an Internet Explorer icon on the desktop, this was the start to the end of Netscape's dominance. People did not see a significant difference between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. They simply went with the default - Internet Explorer. I highly recommend this book.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

This is the best book I have seen on the interplay of strategy and the software business. Finally, there is a book that shows how a company grapples with strategy in the fast-paced and highly competitive software business. Too many other books do not show the strategy process in action. This book not only shows the decisions and why they were made, but the failures and mistakes that happen all the time. Netscape's example shows why it would be awfully nice to simulate your strategy before charging down a road based on gut and assumption.

The authors could have learned much from Lorraine Spurge and her book about MCI (style, summaries and learning points). However, this book does give a very detailed account of what has been labelled the `browser wars'. There are plenty of learning points for anyone interested in becoming involved in providing Internet software/hardware, but for me not enough of an insight into the ongoing politics, marketing and personalities involved in the battle for supremacy on the web. The book is much more clinical than say Kara Swisher's account of AOL. In Swisher's book much of the technical stuff is ignored in favour of a newspaper like style. There appear to be 4 core principles around which the book is structured and apart from the introduction there are 5 chapters to go through the creation of the company, its competitive strategy as well as its development and design strategies. The last chapter is really a summary of lessons learned. Nevertheless the book does introduce concepts such as judo and sumo strategies: judo where you use your opponents strength against itself as in the case of Netscape's approach to allowing its browser to be open as opposed to Microsoft's proprietary approach. Sumo is where you go head to head, a dangerous proposition where your competitor is someone as powerful as Microsoft. " Don't moon the giant," says Ram Shriram (VP OEM). There are other nice quotes such as "eating your own dog food" (using the systems you develop within your own company) which lighten what can be a tedious book to read.

I had bought this book about a year ago, but never got around to reading it until now. My mistake! This is an excellent chronology and analysis of Netscape's growth and the challenges it faced. The quotes from the interviews with many key people at Netscape, as well as people at Microsoft, joined with the authors' analysis was great. I found many, many analogies to Netscape's perdicament with my own challenges at work. I read "AOL.com" by Kara Swisher, which was a good chronology of AOL.com, but it's the analysis and chronology that really differentiates "Competing on Internet Time" from most other "high-tech" books.