Beating Microsoft

Friday, February 25, 2005

Part I: Firefox & IE

Today, I'm starting a mini-series of commentaries on the state of the Browser Wars. I've previously reviewed the ongoing battle of IE against the resurgent Firefox, but I think recent developments merit another look.

Security has long been an issue for IE. So MS's recent announcement of IE 7 was designed to blunt the momentum of alternative browsers.

Yet today, I was intrigued to see Mozilla acting with lightning speed against Microsoft's IE7 announcement. Mozilla immediately announced a dot release of Firefox designed to address security. This seems like a demonstration that although Mozilla/Firefox is hardly a corporation, they're successfully playing the strategy and marketing game against a competitor who is paying people to be smarter at strategy and marketing than anyone else.

Seems pretty clear to me that industry observers like C|Net columnist Molly Wood are missing the true story here. Instead of merely fighting off Firefox in the engineering and security department, Microsoft is getting actively bested by Firefox in marketing, strategy, and development. That's kinda scary.

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