gmiller - 10:23 pm on Jan 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

I wouldn't be so confident that Microsoft can hold on against Firefox. If they decided to restart development on a standalone browser today, how long would it take to get something designed, implemented, tested, and released? They may be able to prevent Firefox from reaching 90% marketshare, but by the time they started to seriously compete again, there'd be no chance of IE ever getting back to the 90% mark.

And keep in mind that, over time, they're going to have much more important battles to fight than whose free browser gets used the most. Can they crack the server OS market? They recently dumped their Itanium version of Windows because it's obvious they won't be able to crack the segments that Itanium is being marketed to, and now Solaris is being released as open source. Linux continues to grow. OpenOffice.org is growing. Why divert your efforts to giving things away when your core cash cows are under attack? Why waste time and money trying to regain a virtual monopoly that's gone forever, now?

And, ultimately, how much does browser quality matter, anyway? The Mozilla Application Suite never really took off because the tech media jumped on the Mozilla-bashing bandwagon and now Firefox is succeeding because the tech press is on the Firefox bandwagon. That's what it seems to come down to.