Eneris Solutions » CEO Blog 3

TV vs. Internet, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer

This tale begins back in 1995, which is probably ancient history for some of you. Microsoft had a small team working on the Internet. Not too many people took it seriously. On the other hand, there were lots of people working on Broadband Cable TV (i.e. SET-TOP BOX), which would be the next great big thing - everyone was talking about sending post cards 'online', renewing your driver’s license, channel guides, etc. (funny sidenote: sending postcards still seems to be the de-facto use-case at Microsoft - have you seen the TABLE-PC, and is cool use cases?)

The two camps had some wars, i.e. they yelled and shouted at each other and tried to explain why their side was more important. “How can you possibly make the Internet work, you got no bandwidth, and HTML is a joke for multimedia – people want graphics and sound”, etc. And the other side replied “Yeah, yeah, whatever, but things are evolving rapidly, and we can get most of your scenarios done just as well with the Internet”.

What happened? Well a company called Netscape showed the power of the Internet. This caught a lot of people by surprise. Internet Explorer, as I remember, had only like 4 or 5 people working on it. So, pressure grew until it was time for a ‘take no prisoners’ battle/meeting Microsoft-style (which means the losers have to work on the winners technology). 

So, to make a long story short, the little Internet team won! And hence, the big Cable TV team were ‘re-org’d’ to the Internet (Something like 50-100 people?). And that provided the acceleration necessary to bring Internet Explorer and Microsoft into the Internet age. So you see, after all, there wasn’t that huge of a gap between Cable and Internet, which allowed Microsoft to catch up very quickly. 

Ok – So whatever happened to Cable TV (hence set top boxes) ? And Digital TV? Coming soon! Or will it be the Internet all over again?

(c) 2008 Thomas O'Rourke