Every month, the technical press religiously reports on the state of the browser market and who or who isn’t losing market share. This is a recent example from ComputerWorld but a variation of this article appears across the spectrum, covering data from what ComputerWorld calls “metrics vendor Net Applications Inc.”. During 2008, the press and analysts the information technology (IT) press interviewed interpreted this data as proof that Microsoft (MSFT) is losing market share in the browser market.
From my admittedly Neanderthal information technology (IT) marketing background, I don’t see how you lose share in a market that does not exist. But perception being as important as reality in IT investment, I think it’s worth asking the question “Does losing market share in a market that does not exist matter?”
Basically the browser market does not exist because browsers are free (as in beer, not speech). They are either standalone free or bundled “free” into other software. In addition, except for esoteric differences only a technonerd can love, browsers fundamentally do the same thing so it is unlikely that anyone is buying the software into which some browsers are bundled because of the browser. In other words, no one is buying or selling browsers and no is buying or selling something else because of browsers. Marketing 101: there is no browser market.
So what does Net Applications mean when it talks about share? What it is measuring is usage, not market share (since there is no market). There is also a question about Net Applications’ methodology because only its customers’ data is used. Its customer base seems highly skewed to ecommerce as compared to all sites in the universe. However the sample size is very large and is probably representative of the universe. In addition, Net Applications shows only a couple of year’s data on its web site.
Does losing market-usage share in browsers matter? It would but in a useful market-research view, going back a decade to look at such an old technology as browsers, I would guess Microsoft has not lost much market-usage share. I cannot find any confirmation but I believe that Firefox--current number two in the Net Applications lineup at 20% to Internet Explorer's 70%--has simply replaced a portion of the former market-usage-leading share held by Netscape, Firefox’s predecessor. Netscape led before Microsoft’s browser had even been introduced. Certainly my opinion is true if one were to compare the market usage statistics of Netscape vs. Microsoft browsers prior to 1999, before Net Applications was founded. For that data, go see the legal papers in U.S. Department of Justice vs. Microsoft.
So what happened to Netscape means that losing market share in a market that does not exist does matter. But only if the functionality being discussed is an important ongoing factor in the market. Competitors have a long history of chasing Microsoft into markets it is milking for all their worth as it is exiting that market. I would guess that browsers are such a market (or by my definition of markets, such functionality). If you want to see what Microsoft sees for human interaction by the middle of the next decade, look to its work in surface computing and the Xbox. By then browsers, will look to you like green screens look to this Neanderthal.
-- Dennis Byron
(P.S. In my opinion Netscape lost the browser war because it lost a server software market battle with the Apache HTTP server, not because of anything Microsoft did. But that's a blog post I already wrote, some time before I even knew what a blog post was.
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