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So you are saying, that MS would have had the same influence it has over the browser standards even if Netscape had won and had a 72% of the browser market? Ummm, no.

You still don't get it. The business war was over content not free browsers. MS's IE experience allowed them to influence the standards but a company does not make a dime off of influencing standards. IE helped give MS a reputation in the Internet world, something they were late to enter - but MS does not make a dime off the browser itself. MS needed to prove they were a or the Internet player and dominating the browser was a way to prove it - they have already done that. The money is in the tools: OS's and .NET. MS geared thier OS's and development tools toward the Internet - now they are the major player so they no longer need to prove it and therefore the significance of the browser war is all but gone. Business is ALL about making money and nobody makes a dime off of browsers. The ONLY way MS could be hurt by a browser is if the browser dominated the "market" and would not display MS's content. MS's content conforms to the W3C standards so this browser would have to go against the Internet standards and therefore little to nothing would work in it and therefore it could never become dominate. The browser war is over.

You are assuming that if other browsers dominate the market in the future that MS will retain its ability to set the standards just because it won the original browser war and got what it wanted?

First, standards don't work like that. Second, MS has only influenced the standards. MS won the browser war because Netscape blew it - their product turned to crap.

The browser war proved MS was an Internet player. That battle is over.

That makes no sense. I guarantee you, that if Microsoft lets IE languish and other browsers begin to dominate....other content providers will attempt to have those browser makers set standards that they prefer rather than what Microsoft prefers. It will be far easier for them to convince the Mozilla folks to ignore Microsoft's latest concept than it is to get the IE team to ignore Microsoft's latest concept.

Ok. This is getting silly. That is not how the standards work...it just doesn't work that way. Clearly you are not in the computer industry.

That is like saying if a DVD manufacturer dominated enough of the market they could create a format that would not play movies produced by Paramount and therefore run them out of business.

If you want to believe another free browser is going to knock MS off it pedestal, don't let me stop you (but please don't invest any real money in this theory).

That is like saying if a DVD manufacturer dominated enough of the market they could create a format that would not play movies produced by Paramount and therefore run them out of business.

One more then. DVD manufacturers could have established a standard of one-use DVD's. Paramount would have much preferred that. But they did not have the power to enforce that, since they were not the DVD manufacturers with an 80% market share. They would have preferred not to have writable DVD's, they would have preferred not have ever had writable VHS. Their content WILL PLAY on all this stuff, but they do not have control over the way it is distributed to the end user or what they can do with it on their end. They can influence what the DVD manufacturers do and what the standards are but are limited.

Microsoft on the other hand has had over 70-80% control over the client-side of internet content distribution. It has had a huge capability to write the standards, influence the standards (or "extend" the standards if it doesn't go their way).

Now even if IE withered and died they would have influence. But it would be more along the lines of your Paramount example. They certainly would give up the power to "extend" the standards on the client side.

Take Microsoft music....
System requirements for the Microsoft service preview release limit use to U.S. consumers using Microsoft Internet Explorer with ActiveX, a technology used in online transactions, on Windows 98 or later operating systems.

That means no support for Mac users, no access for non-U.S. music fans and no support for other browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox.

Thats an easy path to take when IE6 has 80% browser share. But if Firefox were at 80% then MS Music would have to be changing their little concept there. They would not be in quite as much control of what they were doing. It would certainly not let them go for ActiveX arbitrarily without considering what they were doing.

I'm sure that Microsoft could handle those situations. But they would no longer be making the decisions on the client side. Thats not cash gone, but it is power gone, power over the distribution channel which translates to cash on down the road.

Thats my take, and we shall see what IE7 does, how much Firefox grows, when IE7 gets released, etc. Until then, we just don't know.

Flame away.