Internet explorer browsers how to#
Cusumano of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, and Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It. Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.Įxplainer thanks Eitan Bencuya of Google, Michael A. To this day, Microsoft allocates resources for development and maintenance of Internet Explorer with very little idea of the product’s actual financial value. They ultimately decided to offer their browser for free, even going so far as to pay Internet service providers for every customer who switched over from Navigator. Some executives advocated bundling the program into a suite of applications that would be sold as an add-on to Windows 95. So the behemoth spent $130 million annually developing and marketing Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, and the total number of engineers on the project ballooned from five in 1995 to more than 1,000 by the end of the decade. Bill Gates, among others, feared that all computing would eventually become Internet-based, and a computer’s operating system-the source of most of Microsoft’s income-wouldn’t matter as much as its browsing software. The strategy worked pretty well for a while, earning the company almost $200 million in licensing fees in its 1996 heyday.īy then, Microsoft had become concerned about Netscape’s dominance. Early Web titan Netscape, whose Navigator dominated the market in the mid-1990s, charged Internet service providers like America Online a license fee-about $5 per copy in 1996 (PDF)-to use its software. Browsers haven’t always been free Microsoft pioneered its use as a loss leader 15 years ago.