How the Web was almost won

Just how close did we come to a Net ruled by Microsoft? The "server wars" show a grim counterpart to the browser wars.

By Tim O'Reilly

Nov 16, 1999 | In the study of history, it is often the things you don't notice that make all the difference. Connie Willis' wonderful time-travel mystery, "To Say Nothing of the Dog," posits that the entire course of World War II might have depended on such small details as a cat saved from drowning, a missed train and a nosy church warden. In a similar way, I find myself fascinated by the untold story of what we might call the war for the Web.

The Justice Department's antitrust suit and Judge Jackson's finding of fact have focused on how Microsoft used its operating system dominance to wrest control of the Web browser market from Netscape. Perhaps even more significant is the untold story of Microsoft's attempts to corner the Web server market. As someone whose company competes directly with Microsoft, (we sell a Web server called WebSite that runs on Windows NT, and we are active in promoting Perl, Linux and other open-source technologies), I've been privy to some of the not-so-small details that have guided the course of this recent history. And, it seems to me that if it weren't for the work of a small group of independent open-source software developers, the Justice Department intervention might have come too late not just for Netscape but the Web as a whole.

In his findings Judge Jackson made the astute point that the browser is a kind of middleware and, though it uses the features of the operating system, it provides additional "applications programming interfaces" (API) of its own. The most familiar of these aren't APIs like Win32, which describes how to write programs for Windows, but rather languages and protocols like HTML, Javascript and HTTP. Anyone who runs a Web site is intimately familiar with the attempts by both Microsoft and Netscape to turn these open standards to their advantage by introducing proprietary incompatibilities into the version of HTML recognized by their browsers. But the APIs that have turned out to matter don't just reside in the browser.

Judge Jackson's analysis completely avoided the server side of the equation -- and it is the server which has turned out to be the real next-generation platform. When Judge Jackson talks about applications and APIs, he's clearly still thinking about Office-style desktop applications residing on the PC, albeit running in the browser rather than directly on the native operating system. Yet the most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on.

The server side of the Web is the new platform that Microsoft was rightly afraid of.

Next Page: The rise of IIS and a Web-server bully

• View blog reactions