There were several announcements yesterday.
First: The W3C finally got around to publishing one of the drafts
of the
HTML5 spec as a "first public working draft" (a misnomer if ever
there was one, given the history of HTML5). This is news for one
reason and one reason only: it starts the W3C patent policy clock,
which means that within a few months we will know if any of the
browser vendors have patents they wish to use to block progress on the
Web. Still, a step forwards.
Second: The syntax for Microsoft's plans for yet another
quirks mode switch in IE8 were announced. Basically they are
offering authors the option to pick a specific set of bugs, defaulting
to IE7's. The idea is that with each new major IE version, they can
decide to simply freeze their last set of bugs forever.
If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep
losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems
for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with
reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible
with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have
to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up
implementing these same bug modes themselves. It might actually be
quite an effective way of dramatically increasing the costs of
entering or competing in the browser market. (This is what we call
"anti-competitive", or "evil".)
It will also increase the complexity of authoring by an order of
magnitude. Big sites will become locked in to particular IE version
numbers, unable to upgrade their content for fear of it
breaking. Imagine in 18 years — only twice the current lifetime
of the Web! — designers will not have to learn just HTML,
they'll have to learn 4, 5, maybe 10 different versions of HTML, DOM,
CSS, and JS, just to be able to maintain the various different pages
that people have written, as they move from job to job.
I mentioned
all this on public-html last April, pointing
out that if Microsoft was really interested in not breaking the
Web they would instead send technical comments on the HTML5 spec,
explaining what exactly the spec requires that is incompatible with
deployed content. (Microsoft have yet to send any technical feedback
on HTML5 at all, 8 months later.)
I've been shocked to see several people in the industry supporting
this move, including people whom I have met personally and whom I know
know better, but I'm in no position to criticise people who should
have known better. I'm glad to see that at least people from Opera, from
Mozilla (continued),
from
Webkit, and even from the
WaSP, and from the community as a whole (if the comments on
Slashdot and other sites are representative) see this for what it
is.
There are several directions we can go in from here. We could
prematurely claim that our pages want IE8's new quirks mode, which
would likely cause pages to change rendering in IE8 as compared to
IE7. However, that's mostly a futile exercise, as either few people
will do this, and it won't matter, or a lot of people will do this,
and Microsoft will just change the syntax before IE8 comes out.
We could use the "edge" feature that is apparently being provided
to always trigger the latest mode. However, that would be even worse:
if enough people use this feature, then Microsoft will feel compelled
to just make "edge" equivalent to "IE8" and introduce a new way to
trigger the "latest" mode.
This is what happened with the original DOCTYPE-switched "standards
mode": many people wanted their pages to use the latest standards, but
found that they ran into bugs in IE6, so they worked around those bugs
with hacks — which relied on simple parsing bugs — to pass
content specifically to IE6. With IE7, many of the simple parsing bugs
that these hacks relied on were fixed, but the bigger underlying
problems that the hacks were working around weren't. The pages thus
broke in IE7. Microsoft's reaction was to make "standards mode" mean
"IE7" mode, and to introduce a new mode ("IE8"). The same will happen
if so many people use "edge" that a significant number of pages break
in IE8 or IE9.
We could encourage everyone to actually use this feature, but
actually then we're just contributing to making the syntax legitimate,
and we end up fragmenting the Web, on Microsoft's terms. This is
possibly the worst outcome.
Finally, we could just ignore the feature altogether, continuing to
use JS compatibility libraries for the time being, the same way that
everyone has been doing for years. Authors would also have to support
IE7 anyway, at least for the forseeable future, so it wouldn't be an
additional cost. This would make the experience on IE worse than on
other browsers, but not so much worse as to turn users away from the
sites themselves. Microsoft would find themselves having to support a
number of rendering modes that were not being used, which is not a
cost-effective measure; they would find their market share eroding, as
customers switched to browsers that actually followed standards; and
they would find their developers still asking for standards compliance
that was actually compliant to the specs and interoperable with other
browsers.
Therefore I recommend not including the meta tag, or, if
you are forced to include it, making sure it says "IE=7", even once
IE8 ships. This seems to me to be the best way to show your
support for an open, interoperable Web on the long term.
It will be interesting to see whether IE8 really supports Acid2, since that test page
doesn't include any of the special magic words being proposed
here. Will they hard-code the URI? Will they check every page against
a fingerprint and if it matches the fingerprint of the Acid2 page,
trigger the IE8 quirks mode instead of the IE7 quirks mode?
Third: Well, not really an announcement, but Sjoerd
Visscher pointed out something that for some reason I had never
heard of, and which nobody I have spoken to about it since has ever
heard of: using document.createElement() with the tag
name of an unknown tag causes IE7's HTML parser to start parsing that
tag differently. This piece of information makes building an HTML5
compatibility shim for IE7 far easier than had previously been
assumed. This is probably the most noteworthy news of the day. I don't
really know why I didn't know this before.
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Evolution is evident and well-known in biological species, and can be seen in
artifical environments
quite easily, but evolution actually applies to any environment with moderately well-defined entities that have moderately measurable properties, where these entities
appear and disappear over time.
For example, companies, as a species, are subject to evolution. They are born,
they live, they die; and they each have unique properties (different ways that they operate)
which determine their characteristics. Actually, the whole of the species "group of
people with a common agenda" is subject to evolution, but let's look specifically at
companies that try to convince people to use their products or services in the software
industry, since that's what I'm familiar with.
For a long time, the software industry consisted primarily of one kind of company.
First the company would be founded with an idea, and then the company would get venture
capital funding, which would be used to fund software development, the fruits of which
would be sold to customers, and the money raised from those sales would fund further
development of more software, and the cycle continued.
These companies die when they run out of money. Since venture capital isn't infinite
(investors will stop pouring money in when they realise that they are never going to
see any of it again), the key is raising money from software sales. There are several ways
of ensuring that a company will get money from software sales:
- If the product being sold is the only product in the market that solves the needs
of the users it targets, then it is almost certain that the majority of the target audience
will buy the product. This is called a monopoly.
- If the product being sold is by far the best product in its category, then,
all other things (especially the price) being equal, it is likely that much of the target
audience will buy the product. Making the best product often requires disproportionally
more effort than creating a mediocre product, though. It is also difficult to maintain
the honour of having the best product; it requires constant development to keep ahead
of the competition. It is much easier to improve a mediocre product to be almost as good
as the best product than it is to take a product that is already the best product and
make it significantly better.
- If the product being sold is the cheapest product in its category, then
it is likely that much of the target audience will buy the product, so long as the product
is good enough. How good the product has to be to be "good enough" is a function
of how much cheaper the product is relative to the other products.
- If the product is being sold to users of existing products in the same product category,
then the target audience is more likely to buy the product if the total cost of switching
to the new product is lower than the cost of switching to another product. When the users
are using an older version of the new product, then this is called vendor lock-in.
When the user are using an older version of another product, then this is called
migration.
Each of these strategies has a counter-strategy. For example, to counter an
incumbent with a monopoly position, a company "just" has to provide a product of equal value.
To counter a competitor with the best product, a company "just" has to provide a product that is
better. To counter a competitor with a cheaper product, a company "just" has to lower its prices.
To counter a competitor whose users would find it more expensive to switch to the company's
new product than they would to upgrade to the newer version of the competition's product,
the company "just" has to provide a transition path (if the cost of switching vendor would come
from having to convert all existing data, for instance, a company could "just" support the
competition's file formats).
Of course, that's often easier said than done. A company can't lower its prices to below
its operating costs, as doing so would cause the company to eventually run out of money and die.
Similarly, making the best product is significantly more difficult than making a mediocre product,
and a company can run out of funds while trying.
It turns out, though, that the rules change when the competiting companies are unequal.
If a company has a lot of money, there are a number of tricks it can play to compete with
companies with less money:
- The big company can sell its products for significantly less than its smaller competition
(and at a loss for the big company, using its large cash reserves to survive).
The competition will eventually die, since it won't be able to sell products and thus will run
out of money. When the competition goes away, the big company can raise prices again.
- The big company can implement one-way transition paths from every competitor's product to its
own, and then introduce a feature that makes a reverse migration expensive. Users that switch
to the big company's product will be locked in, which will reduce the potential market for
the competition.
- The big company can improve the product while it has competition, and then stop improving
while it has no competition.
- The big company can use its credibility to reduce the likelihood that users will buy
products from the competition, even if the big company doesn't yet have a competing product.
This is known as spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).
This is where the evolution comes in. If a big company repeatedly kills all the companies that follow
the model I've described so far, then only the companies that use different models will
survive.
This isn't all theoretical. Microsoft is a big company, and they've played all the tricks above.
Many companies in the software industry have died because they failed to make money, and many of those
died because Microsoft starved them of that money by using the tricks described above. (Sometimes,
the use of those tricks has been deemed illegal; other times, not. That's besides the point here.)
What's interesting is the effects that Microsoft's strategies have had from an evolutionary standpoint.
When we look at the major companies competing with Microsoft today, we find that none of them are actually using
the operating model I describe above.
Beating Microsoft by not needing money:
Firefox, Apache, and Linux-based operating systems are examples of open source software
arising as ways to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft's usual strategies typically don't work with open
source software. Microsoft can't undersell open source, as it costs nothing. Furthemore, since the source
is independent of the company behind the source, if the company runs out of money another one can simply
come along and replace it, continuing from where it left off. Thus, starving the company of money doesn't
actually kill the competition; indeed, open source software actually turns this strategy against the big
company. It will take a long time, but in due course Microsoft will run out of money if it doesn't
make profits, whereas open source projects can continue indefinitely.
Open source is not perfectly safe against the other tactics described above, though. It is still vulnerable to vendor
lock-in and FUD, and a better product can still beat it. Projects like Wine help Linux with vendor lock-in,
as it allows users using Microsoft Windows to switch to Linux more cheaply than if they had to
replace all their software; similarly Open Office implements file format convertors to read Microsoft
Office documents; and Samba implements Microsoft's networking protocols to allow a migration to
a Linux-based infrastructure without requiring that users switch all their existing infrastructure
at the same time.
FUD is heavily used by Microsoft against open source projects (a recent example is
this
FUD article against Firefox); open source as a development model can mitigate this by leveraging its
community to counter such claims.
The biggest difficulty, though, is in creating and maintaining the
best product. Nothing especially changed in the browser market in the years just before Firefox 1.0 was released:
the market was stagnant after IE6's release, with all the alternatives (Netscape, Opera, etc) being
fundamentally not good enough in comparison. Firefox 1.0 was the best product of its time, and that reason,
and that reason alone, resulted in its success. All Microsoft have to do to beat Firefox is make a better
product, something for which they certainly have the resources. Similarly, all the Linux OS community has to do
to beat Windows is create a fundamentally better product from the end user's perspective, while ensuring
that the cost of migration is lower than the cost of upgrading Windows.
Microsoft has clearly realised that open source is a new type of competitor, and they just as clearly
haven't worked out how to compete with it (which is simply to make a better product). This is probably
because they have spent so long as the "big company" that they have forgotten the four ways of making
money, and can only remember the tricks for competing with smaller companies.
Microsoft making a superior product wouldn't kill open source, though. It would just make Microsoft
money while the open source community and companies themselves developed a better product again. (Just
look at open source today: Linux operating systems aren't, from the end user's perspective, fundamentally
better than Windows, but Linux OS companies continue with a growing but small set of the users.) Thus the technique
of improving only until the competition is dead doesn't work on open source competitiors. Microsoft
would have to continuously work to improve its products to compete with open source.
Beating Microsoft by not allowing vendor lock-in:
Google's operating practices differ from the typical software vendor in that the main service that Google
provides is completely devoid of any vendor lock-in potential. Google beat the search engines before it
by being better than they were, and Google could easily lose all its users overnight if a much better
search engine was to be developed. The only reason Google has a majority market share is that it is the
best. Microsoft's usual strategies don't work against this kind of company: they can't lock the users into
their alternative, and so the users have a truly free choice as to which service to use, Microsoft's or
the competition's, and they usually pick the better alternative.
Google has also learnt the zero cost trick: by charging advertisers instead of charging users, Google
can get a large market share of users, which is needed to sell to advertisers. Google's search engine users
don't care how many advertisers publish ads through Google, so even if Microsoft undercut Google on
the advertiser side, it still wouldn't reduce the number of users on the search side. In addition, because
the advertisers want to advertise on the site with the users, and because advertisers could just use both
advertising systems, undercutting on the advertising side doesn't actually hurt Google. (Making advertising
free on Microsoft's network would just lead to advertisers advertising on both networks, which would
hurt Microsoft, since they would be footing the bill, but not Google, who would still be making money.)
The FUD strategy depends on the credibility of the company spreading it, but Google is widely trusted,
so FUD doesn't work very effectively against Google either.
As noted above, though, there is a simple way in which Microsoft (or any other company) could compete with Google: make
a better product. In fact, since Google's entire strategy — intentionally or not — is based
on not allowing vendor lock-in, any better product which is also free would almost immediately beat Google.
Naturally, Google invests heavily in making sure it continuously improves. (Note that unlike with open source,
which could probably continue indefinitely under a superior competitor, it isn't clear that Google actually
could survive for long once it lost its users to a competitor.)
Beating Microsoft just by being better:
This brings me to my third example, Apple. Apple has died and been reborn several times, as far as I can tell,
but its most recent strategy is based almost exclusively on one concept: making the best product for the
user, and doing so in several different markets at once. This technique is difficult, because it requires constant
high-quality development. However, it is very effective against a big company like Microsoft that has, by and
large, stopped relying on quality to compete.
As a corollary, Apple has found an interesting counter-strategy to the big-company strategy of undercutting
the competition until it is starved. It sells its products with very high profit margins, and sells these
products in a small number of very separate markets. Thus, it doesn't have to sell many units to survive at
all, and it doesn't need to sell any units in any one area so long as it sells enough in another
area. So for example, Microsoft couldn't compete with the iPod by giving away the Zune: even if most users
would stop buying iPods and would instead just get the free, or nearly free, Zune, the net effect would just
be that Microsoft would lose lots of money and Apple would wait with few ill effects.
Apple's switch to intel enabled Boot Camp and products like VMWare Fusion, to mitigate the problems of
Microsoft's attempts at vendor lock-in. (Apple also plays its own mild games of vendor lock-in to prevent
users from leaving Apple products once they make the switch.)
Apple has, even more than Google, become somewhat immune to Microsoft FUD purely on the basis of its
own credibility. By almost never pre-announcing products, by repeatedly delivering products of high quality,
and by a management of the media so adept as to be aweinspiring, Apple has managed to almost completely
neutralise any FUD attempt against them.
But again, there is one way that Apple is vulnerable. If Microsoft were to make a truly superior
product, Apple would lose users. However, unless this strategy was applied to all of Apple's products simultaneously,
it wouldn't kill Apple, it would only starve one particular part of the company. All Apple would have to do to
come back is make a significantly better product again.
Conclusion: The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has
resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet
all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product.
For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
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