But in the end, Netscape never offers to adhere to standards recommended by the W3C. When pressed, Andreessen concedes as much. "We've been sort of lucky in that most of what we've innovated either is or is becoming a standard," he says. But is it luck? "Well, now that you ask," he chuckles, "what helps us most is that we were first, and we continue to be first--because that's what we try to do."
Since the company jumped into the scene in April 1994, bringing to the Web an exceptionally easy-to-use, full-featured browser, Netscape's business model has been based on leapfrogging the status quo and coming out with new features ahead of anybody else. Standard Web-page features like the ability to center, align, frame, and move text around in chunks were developed and popularized by Netscape. Those innovations spawned an entire new industry of browser developers, Web masters, and value-added Web service providers, and brought the Web into the homes and offices of an ever-increasing portion of the world's population. Of course, groups other than Netscape have contributed and continue to contribute new Web features and extensions that are becoming either standards or for the time being de facto standards, most notably Sun Microsystem's Java programming language and Microsoft's object-oriented development tools known as ActiveX. (In October, Microsoft agreed to turn control of ActiveX over to the Open Group in Cambridge, Mass., a software-industry group that has helped shape standards for the UNIX operating system.)
But few would disagree that the majority of the HTML features and extensions that the W3C ends up blessing--and more important, that most people end up using--come from Netscape. As market-research and consulting firm META Group Inc.'s program director Stan Lepeak points out, "It's Netscape's mark that defines what is and is not a standard."
Netscape managers suggest that the problem isn't that the company is determined to maintain control of the Web but rather that the consortium approach to setting standards is somehow lacking. "You can have more fun whacking yourself with a ball-peen hammer than going to standards meetings," says Netscape's Cargill. Haeberli goes further: "Being a consortium, the W3C is composed of its members," he says. "And so what that means is that the consortium, without its members, isn't. I don't want to dismiss it, but it really doesn't have an existence."
On the other hand, who can blame Netscape? After all, setting standards for the Web has been the company's main competitive edge. If Web users go with another company's browser, they risk using something that simply doesn't work with many sites because it doesn't comply with Netscape's standards, which are set on the fly from Navigator release to Navigator release. The same holds true of the software that runs Web sites on servers. As Vint Cerf, senior vice-president of data architecture at MCI (best known as the Father of the Internet) observes, "There's an understandable tension between agreeing on standards that everyone supports and product differentiation that distinguishes one product from another. Netscape has been pretty focused on product differentiation in its short history, and from the business perspective, that's understandable."
The policy of ignoring the W3C and setting its own standards certainly hasn't hurt Netscape, whose Mountain View, Calif., parking lot is filled with BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes so new that many don't have license plates. Netscape fetched a $2.2-billion market value on the opening day of its initial public offering while it was still losing money and showed little promised of making any in the near future. Why should it change its business model?
One might assume that Netscape's behavior is a source of considerable frustration to the W3C. In fact, consortium personnel are quite tight-lipped about it. Berners-Lee seems to insist that being a standards hog is incompatible with success. "Companies know that it is only interesting to compete over one feature until everyone can do it," he says. "After that, the feature becomes part of the base, and everyone wants to do it in one standard way. The smart companies are competing on the implementations--aspects like functionality, speed, ease of use, and support--that differentiate products." But if Netscape's and Microsoft's Web software isn't competing on nonstandard features, that's news to them and to everyone else in the industry. Only MIT's Jim Miller (who works in the W3C's "technology and society" area) risks breaching decorum, if mildly, by being forthright: "There are, we have to be honest, companies that while supporting a standard, have a proprietary way of doing it."
Industry players outside Netscape and the W3C are, predictably, more blunt about things. "There's nothing wrong with a company's advancing proprietary standards so that they become de facto standards," says Prakash Ambegaonkar, CEO of Frontier Technologies Corp., an Internet- and intranet-applications software company in Mequon, Wis. "The problem is if it isn't sincere about being open. Duplicity. There is a feeling that Netscape has that." Netscape's ability to come out with new features before they are standardized gives Netscape "a special advantage," he adds. David Gifford, vice-chairman of electronic-commerce software purveyor Open Market, in Cambridge, Mass., agrees. "As much as they say they want to standardize, they really don't," he says.
