By: David J. Wardell

© 1997 By: David J. Wardell.  Reproduction or redistribution in any form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

There are only two serious candidates: Netscape’s "Navigator," which dominates the industry—among the few significant areas of desktop computing where Microsoft does not—or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Other products appeal to select or captive markets but are sliding inexorably toward oblivion.

On features alone Netscape outperforms Explorer in most significant areas, especially in light of the new "Netscape Communicator" package, which includes Navigator 4.0. Explorer’s security problems revealed in early March are easily corrected and of no long-term significance.

If only choices were that simple and we didn’t need to understand the battle for the desktop. Single vendor security or diversity: the familiar story has played before in the computer industry and will again, yet it remains among the most important decisions facing users.

If you accept Microsoft’s proposition that Windows and its derivatives are fundamental to future computing and that local network and Internet access must be tied as closely as practical to the operating system, then Internet Explorer is the choice. When Explorer 4 and Windows 97 are released a much tighter relationship between the "Active Desktop" and The Internet than now exists will emerge, and successful users and developers will be those who get in line with this view, or so they say.

Netscape, on the other hand, (rare among small computer developers in that is hasn’t conceded Microsoft’s dominance or gone complacent), says much more diversity will exist and developers must embrace tools independent of a single operating system or environment.

The two incompatible views are wrapped-up in the products of both companies. Rather than mass adoption of Windows-integrated systems, Netscape offers "GroupWare" that is facilitated and enabled by The Internet. GroupWare allows businesses and their "groups" of employees, to some extent individual users, to exchange data, applications, and tasks, so that everyone becomes more productive and users are able to get at the services they want.

A simple illustration of this difference would be word processing. In Microsoft’s world data interchange is achieved by using Microsoft Word or compatible Windows applications; in Netscape’s vision most text processing takes place directly in HTML, one of the fundamental components of Internet-based document interchange and a vendor-independent standard.

The Netscape approach, in my view, is both more consistent with the real world and ultimately more dynamic. Several years ago mid-range system developers were faced with similar choices between proprietary operating systems and so-called "open systems," of which UNIX was a key component.

The open systems approach turned out to produce much more robust and competitive solutions. This was because a diverse market is better able to embrace rapidly evolving technology, user needs, and the technological uncertainty that both produce.

Netscape’s Communicator is a significant advance over competing products, pushing Internet user tools to new levels of sophistication. Its success as part of a GroupWare strategy remains to be seen, but my vote is that it will shape many of the ways we all interact with small computers.