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Netscape outlines its vision for the future: NONE

Open Network Environment (ONE) <br>takes on Microsoft behind the firewall

By William Blundon, JavaWorld.com, 10/01/96

Great marketing is a formidable weapon. When wielded by a powerful company, it can be as decisive as excellent products. In the traditional software world, marketing of any kind has been difficult to discern, beyond the occasional zippy advertisement or trade show sideshow. From the early days of the Internet Age on, of course, marketing has been everything. Clearly, the two most prominent marketeers have been Microsoft and Netscape. And their game of one-upmanship on the World Wide Web, in the press, and in the courtroom has been fascinating to watch.

The summer months of 1996 were particularly entertaining as Netscape stage-managed a hasty announcement of its intranet strategy to disrupt a planned Microsoft event. Microsoft returned the favor by announcing its plans to license its ActiveX and DCOM technologies to an outside standards organization -- three days before Netscape announced its "standards-based" Open Network Environment. It has been a great summer for comic epithets; Netscape refers to ActiveX as "CaptiveX," and Microsoft will undoubtedly call Netscape's product strategy not Netscape ONE, but "NONE."

However, as this year draws to a close, reality will begin to impinge on the dream world that was the Internet. When it does, take a hard look at both company's strategies, but start with Netscape ONE.

Netscape ONE: The promise

The premise of ONE is unquestionably valid. The Internet and most intranets are moving beyond the stage of simply providing a scalable infrastructure for information retrieval. They are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for distributed computing. As such, there is an increasing need to have not just browser-to-document or document-to-database connectivity, but complete program-to-program communications over the network. As the Internet evolves, expect to see fewer HTML documents at the end of a URL address. Expect to see programs.

Microsoft's ActiveX and Distributed COM provide a capable mechanism for doing this now, albeit in a homogeneous Windows environment. Netscape ONE is designed to provide a new and heterogeneous vision of network-centric computing.

Netscape ONE is a fascinating exercise in seductive marketing. The basic argument is this:

IS development is shifting to a new class of network-centric applications -- those that use the platform-independent technologies and open standards of the Internet to run on any hardware and software platform that supports these standards, without being tied to particular hardware or operating systems extensions.

This may well be true, although many IS shops would disagree with it on the surface. The reality of most IS shops is that they are desperate to develop applications that are easier and less expensive to create and maintain, that reuse as much of their existing infrastructure as possible (computers, databases, applications, networks, and programmers), and that execute on a small set of inexpensive hardware devices. Network-centric, open, standard, platform-independent, intranet, and yes even Java, are relevant only in this context.

 

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