Subject: One browser or many From: "Curt A. Monash" <0006058685@mcimail.com> Date: Fri, 7 Jul 95 23:33 EST

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I think I shall write a short essay on when it is advantageous to make
SOFTWARE platform-specific and when it is advantageous to make it portable,
and see if we have any analogies for the browser situation.

First of all, supporting slight variants of the same platform is usually
right.  Windows, DOS, UNIX, IBM 360 and plug-compatibles -- in each case,
there was little incremental effort in supporting multiple platforms, and
hence it was to vendors' advantage to put in the effort and broaden their
market.  This is self-perpetuating -- the platforms you need to support are
the ones users TREAT as interchangeable, while that support is what makes
them interchangeable.  Right now, for instance, there are half a dozen
flavors of UNIX that need to be supported for business data processing (none
of which are LINUX -- sorry); those half dozen (Sun, HP, IBM, maybe SCO, and
a couple of others at the high end) represent the vast majority of the
market, while providing plenty of openness/flexibility for the users.

I DON'T know how similar Netscape is to other Mosaic-derived browsers, so I
don't know if the analogy applies here.

How about fundamentally different platforms?  If you start on the dominant
platform (IBM mainframes in their era, Windows today), it is rarely worth
the trouble to move to lesser platforms.  The software development expense
is a significant fraction of the cost of the root product (typically an
aggregate of at least double); in some cases, building in portability
creates significant problems in terms of time-to-market, etc., cratering
your whole development operation.  

Does the analogy hold in online publishing?  When we're talking about
formatting content for presentation, probably.  If presentation is most of
your expense, pick Netscape to present on and the hell with everything else.
What if the content development costs far exceed the formatting costs?  Then
you might as well present your content on every platform you can.

Of course, there's a big exception.  If you start out focused on an
important niche platform (maybe because it was the best/only option
technically at the time), you later should port to the (often newly)
dominant platform.  The RDBMS industry started on VAXen before porting to
UNIX; several the leading Windows application software vendors (including
Microsoft!) introduced their products on the Macintosh.

The analogy in our world is that if you don't work well w/ Netscape, you
better get there fast.

Curt Monash
Software Industry Pundit
cmonash@mcimail.com


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