How Google is slowing innovation

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I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop as I write this. The lattes here are strong and the wifi is speedy. Of course, once in a while, I experience login problems or poor data speeds – but it’s rare. It’s rare because hardware manufacturers and software developers have agreed on a standard.

Our modern world relies on people agreeing to work by common rules. And in the online sphere, this begins with open standards. But sometimes, people try to game the system.

Take HTML, the standard language for writing web pages invented in the 90s by Tim Berners-Lee, as example. The HTML specification has evolved over the years, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) acts as a forum for gaining specification consensus from large players such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft.

But there’s been a history of skirmishes, with different companies proposing their own variants. During the first browser wars, Netscape proposed the blink tag, while Microsoft came up with the marquee.

There’s no problem with that (apart from lousy aesthetics), right? Wrong. Only Netscape Navigator knew what to do with blink, and only Internet Explorer (IE) knew what to do with marquee. They were modifying a standard so that it would only run with their software.

They were trying to build a monopoly.

The quest for domination

Microsoft famously coined the phrase “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for dominating markets where competitors benefited from open standards. Here’s an example of how it played out.

They wanted Office to become the gold standard for productivity software – and they succeeded. But not long after establishing the dominance of their desktop operating system, Microsoft realized that another challenge was looming.

The world wide web was becoming wildly successful – and to an extent that few people had foreseen. Not only could people browse websites that were outside Microsoft’s control, but Netscape also introduced Javascript, which allowed developers to write code for browsers. In effect, Netscape was inventing a new operating system, distributed between the client-side browser and the remote server.

Even worse, content on the web was platform-agnostic: browsers worked just fine on Mac, Unix, and Windows, so an application that ran in the browser would rip open the Microsoft business model.

In order to get a piece of the action, Microsoft launched IE in 1995 as a direct competitor to Netscape Navigator. Initially, it only had a tiny market share: less than 10 percent in 1996. So, this was more of an air kiss than a full embrace of the internet.

Things heated up with the release of IE3, bundled as a free component of Windows in 1996. It also integrated a number of apps that were part of the Microsoft ecosystem: an internet mail client (later to become Outlook Express), an address book, and the Windows Media Player.

Google: the new king of embrace, extend, extinguish

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