Lots of things change really fast on the Web. The phrase "Internet time" has often been used to describe the way things actually do move faster on the Internet.
I remember how quickly Google displaced MetaCrawler as my go-to search service. I remember MySpace just blowing Friendster out of the water. TechCrunch obsoleted c|net almost overnight.
On the Internet, we'd like to believe, if a better product comes out, people move to it quickly.
But some things we associate with the Internet don't change fast. One of those things is browsers. Why is that? What's making it so difficult for superior products to leap frog each other the way so many other Internet products do.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser accounted for ~95% of the global browser usage in 2004 when Firefox first burst onto the scene. In the five years that Firefox has been taking share from IE, it's only managed to siphon off about 22 points of share from IE. For the first two of those years, without any effort at all from Microsoft. That's 4-5 points of share per year.
That's not the rate of change that I think people think of when they talk about Internet time.
Another example is Apple's Safari browser on Macintosh. Apple's bundling of Safari caused it to very quickly become the dominant Mac browser. In the four and a half years since we shipped Firefox 1.0 for Mac, we've managed to siphon off about 27 points of share from Safari, but Safari still sits with a comfortable 72% of Mac browser usage.
On both Windows and Mac, the OS vendor bundles a browser and taking browser usage share from those is very difficult. No one, other than Mozilla, has been able to put a substantial dent in the share of those two bundled browsers.
(What's also really interesting to me is that Firefox has done better on Mac where it has had a much more capable competitor in Safari.)
One of the reasons that no one is able to seriously dent Microsoft and Apple's browser share is that those two OS vendors ship their OS and their bundled browser on about 300 million new PCs every year.
By my estimates, about 100 million of those are new computer users (and new browser users) and the other 200 million of those are upgrades.
For the 100 million or so people getting PCs and going on line for the first time each year, the OS vendors have first crack. They are the default and the initial experience. If it's "good enough" then inertia wins and the OS vendor gets that browser growth essentially for free, piggybacking on the overall growth of PCs.
That's how I explain, because I can't think of any better explanation, Microsoft adding ~300 million IE users to its roster between the release of IE 6 in August of 2001 when development on IE was ended and the release of IE 7 in October of 2006.
(How many other products that we think of as Internet products can go 5 years without significant improvement and still add 300 million new users.)
Sure, there wasn't a lot of competition from 2002 to 2004, but even if you just look at the years 2004 through 2007, when there was substantial competition and nothing at all new from Microsoft, they still gained more than 100 million new IE users.
And I think it's actually worse than that. If you look at the 200 million new PCs sold each year that are upgrades, they all come with the the OS vendor's Web browser as the default browser regardless of what browser the user had on her previous machine.
That gives the OS vendor the opportunity to re-convert any Firefox (or other not-the-vendor browsers) users at zero cost.
So, even if Mozilla or Google or Opera managed to get a PC user to switch there's a very good chance that in the not too distant future Microsoft or Apple will at least temporarily regain that user's default browser status and another shot at being just "good enough" for inertia to work for them again -- all this without having to do anything to actually make their browser better.
(I'm not saying they don't improve their browsers, though there was that long IE dry spell there...)
This is a huge advantage for OS bundled browsers and something that is very different from most of the rest of the Internet. It's also something that I don't think many people think about when they think about browsers and competition between browsers.
I'm asserting that OS vendors can and do highly leverage the OEM channel for their browsers, both for new users coming online and for seasoned users upgrading, is the single biggest reason that Web browsers aren't evolving and replacing each other on "Internet time".
What do you think?
