We have been writing web stories rather often lately. After the NeXT computer story we published last time, we wanted to share that lovely spat between Mozilla and Explorer as well. It happened in 1997 and it made the newspaper clippings in America at the time. You could call it Microsoft’s first skirmish with Netscape in the world browser race.
When the calendar turned to October 1997, Internet Explorer 4 shipped and Microsoft threw a large launch party. Not at the company headquarters in Redmond though, but in Silicon Valley, which is to say close to the Netscape head office.
And the day came, and what a party it must have been. At the party the Internet Explorer developers saw a giant piece of stage decoration, 3 meters by 4, in the shape of the browser logo. Carried away by the excitement of the new release, presumably, they decided the decoration would look better in the garden of their rivals at Netscape.
The Microsoft staff ordered a truck driver and paid him to deliver the giant “e” logo to the now legendary Netscape headquarters in Mountain View. A sort of “good morning” from their biggest rival, or a friendly joke, childish as it was. The year is 2024 and here in Istanbul at Türk SEM we are writing up that mad joke of yours, whichever engineer thought of it first.
Note: we took this from the story told in the documentary “Download: The True Story of the Internet”. Watch that episode on Archive.org and you can learn what I learned.
What the documentary leaves out is how Netscape answered. Around midnight the Microsoft programmers set the enormous letter “e” down in front of the company entrance, took a few photographs (with the letter, naturally), had a good laugh and left. What they did not know was that some people were still inside the Netscape building, watching the childish joke the Internet Explorer engineers were pulling. Being jokers themselves, the Netscape staff decided to answer Microsoft’s enormous greeting card straight away. As former Netscaper John Francis Stracke wrote on rec.humor.funny:
They rounded up some people to help, tipped the IE logo over so it was upside down, spray painted “Netscape Now” on the side facing the street… and then hauled out our 2 meter Mozilla statue (Netscape’s Godzillaoid) and set it on top of the IE logo.
Some people said Microsoft was trying to catch the attention of the media with its pranks. Whether or not that was the real intention, the local news and television picked the story up. The news agency Reuters ran a piece interviewing the then Netscape spokesman Chris Holten:
Holten said, “resorting to these tactics to get attention seems extremely childish.” “We are winning the war. This is what you would expect from a new startup, not from the largest software company in the world” (meaning Microsoft).
Little did they know how soon their world would change. Both of them look to have gone up onto the dusty shelves of history. Google Chrome took the stage on its own, after all. The largest slice of the pie is theirs in browser use and in the search market alike. Microsoft did one thing very well, and that was the operating system. Sadly it fell short on the work that would have completed the arguments behind it.
I became part of the Netscape family through its DMOZ side. It has always been a brand I felt warmly about.
Is There Anything to Take From This?
Most of what we write is meant to inspire; whether this one does, I do not know. But; even a software giant can carry childish jokes around inside it.
