Microsoft Was Successful in Excluding Navigator From the Channels: What Was Their Strategy?

G. Microsoft’s Success in Excluding Navigator from the Channels that Lead Most Efficiently to Browser Usage

357. The cumulative effect of the stratagems described above was to ensure that the easiest and most intuitive paths that users could take to the Web would lead to Internet Explorer, the gate controlled by Microsoft.

     
     

     Microsoft did not actually prevent users from obtaining and using Navigator (although it tried to do as much in June 1995), but Microsoft did make it significantly less convenient for them to do so. Once Internet Explorer was seen as providing roughly the same browsing experience as Navigator, relatively few PC users showed any inclination to expend the effort required to obtain and install Navigator.

     
     

     Netscape could still carpet bomb the population with CD-ROMs and make Navigator available for downloading. In reality, however, few new users (i.e., ones not merely upgrading from an old version of Navigator to a new one) had any incentive to install — much less download and install — software to replicate a function for which OEMs and IAPs were already placing perfectly adequate browsing software at their disposal.

     
     

     The fact that Netscape was forced to distribute tens of millions of copies of Navigator through high-cost carpet-bombing in order to obtain a relatively small number of new users only discloses the extent of Microsoft’s success in excluding Navigator from the channels that lead most effectively to browser usage.

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This court case Civil Action No. 98-1232 (TPJ) retrieved on 2-10-2023, from justice.gov is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction.