The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: "Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.

Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.

How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at a time when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with the Web and Internet Explorer had yet to attract many adopters, Microsoft made a risky but strategically wise decision to redesign the Internet Explorer code from the bottom up - re-architecting, in industry jargon. As Michael A. Cusumano of M.I.T. and David B. Yoffie of Harvard chronicled in their 1998 book, "Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft," that decision meant delaying the release of Internet Explorer 3.0, but the resulting product was technically far superior to Netscape's Navigator. In Browser Wars I, the better browser won. "