When you publish your opinions on a regular basis, it’s hard to resist the urge to gloat after you’ve been proven correct. (For example, I

The Location Field Is the New Command Line

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2022-09-22 03:30:05

When you publish your opinions on a regular basis, it’s hard to resist the urge to gloat after you’ve been proven correct. (For example, I’ll be I-told-you-so-ing with regard to the iPod mini for the next couple of years.)

It’s a good thing I wasn’t publishing Daring Fireball back in the mid-to-late ’90s, because if I had been, I’d currently be eating an awful lot of crow with regard to what I would have written about the web’s potential as an application platform.

At that time, at the peak of the Netscape-Microsoft browser war, the conventional wisdom was that the web was the future of application development. The technology certainly didn’t yet exist, but the idea was that Netscape’s web browser posed a serious threat to Microsoft’s Windows monopoly — that at some point in the future, user applications would be written to run within the browser.

Thus, Microsoft’s incredible change of course, going from more or less ignoring the Internet to completely dominating it within the course of a few years. The idea was that Microsoft killed Netscape because Microsoft saw them as a threat to Windows.

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