The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating): "How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at a time when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with the Web and Internet Explorer had yet to attract many adopters, Microsoft made a risky but strategically wise decision to redesign the Internet Explorer code from the bottom up - re-architecting, in industry jargon. As Michael A. Cusumano of M.I.T. and David B. Yoffie of Harvard chronicled in their 1998 book, 'Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft,' that decision meant delaying the release of Internet Explorer 3.0, but the resulting product was technically far superior to Netscape's Navigator. In Browser Wars I, the better browser won.
Today, it's the Internet Explorer code that is long overdue for a top-to-bottom redesign, one that would treat security as integral, and Firefox is the challenger with new, clean code. Netscape bequeathed its software to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which used an open-source approach to undertake a complete rewrite that took three years. Firefox is built upon the Mozilla base."

Lots of similar articles these days; nearly all conveniently ignore the fact that Netscape/Mozilla was basically out of the market for most of the last decade.