Server wars

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

==========================

Just how close did we come to a Net ruled by Microsoft? The "server 
wars" show a grim counterpart to the browser wars.

by Tim O'Reilly
Salon.com


In the study of history, it is often the things you don't notice that 
make all the difference. Connie Willis' wonderful time-travel 
mystery, "To Say Nothing of the Dog," posits that the entire course 
of World War II might have depended on such small details as a cat 
saved from drowning, a missed train and a nosy church warden. In a 
similar way, I find myself fascinated by the untold story of what we 
might call the war for the Web.  

The Justice Department's antitrust suit and Judge Jackson's finding 
of fact have focused on how Microsoft used its operating system 
dominance to wrest control of the Web browser market from 
Netscape. Perhaps even more significant is the untold story of 
Microsoft's attempts to corner the Web server market. As someone 
whose company competes directly with Microsoft, (we sell a Web 
server called WebSite that runs on Windows NT, and we are active 
in promoting Perl, Linux and other open-source technologies), I've 
been privy to some of the not-so-small details that have guided the 
course of this recent history. And, it seems to me that if it weren't for 
the work of a small group of independent open-source software 
developers, the Justice Department intervention might have come 
too late not just for Netscape but the Web as a whole.  

In his findings Judge Jackson made the astute point that the browser 
is a kind of middleware and, though it uses the features of the 
operating system, it provides additional "applications programming 
interfaces" (API) of its own. The most familiar of these aren't APIs 
like Win32, which describes how to write programs for Windows, but 
rather languages and protocols like HTML, Javascript and HTTP. 
Anyone who runs a Web site is intimately familiar with the attempts 
by both Microsoft and Netscape to turn these open standards to their 
advantage by introducing proprietary incompatibilities into the 
version of HTML recognized by their browsers. But the APIs that 
have turned out to matter don't just reside in the browser.  

Judge Jackson's analysis completely avoided the server side of the 
equation -- and it is the server which has turned out to be the real 
next-generation platform. When Judge Jackson talks about 
applications and APIs, he's clearly still thinking about Office-style 
desktop applications residing on the PC, albeit running in the 
browser rather than directly on the native operating system. Yet the 
most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside 
on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about 
Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on.  

The server side of the Web is the new platform that Microsoft was 
rightly afraid of.  

The government's case didn't focus on the server side because 
Microsoft doesn't hold a monopoly position there. Browser-access 
statistics prove fairly conclusively that even in Netscape's heyday, 
the majority of clients were running on the Windows platform. But on 
the server side, the dominant market share belonged -- and still 
belongs -- to UNIX-based servers, particularly the open-source 
Apache Web server and its derivatives.  

Microsoft might argue that the importance of Apache and server-side 
technologies like Perl, PHP and Java servlets demonstrate that 
competition abounds, and that as a result, Microsoft doesn't have an 
effective monopoly. But the situation is more complex than that. The 
company clearly has a monopoly on client-side operating systems 
and has consistently tried to use that monopoly to extend its 
leverage to any new platform it can.  

In fact, the rise of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as the 
dominant Web server on NT shows much the same pattern as the 
rise of IE as the dominant browser: Microsoft got pole position by 
exercising its unique leverage as an operating system vendor.  

Originally IIS, Web server software that runs only on the NT 
operating system, was bundled "free" with a version of NT called NT 
Server. Web server vendors such as Netscape and O'Reilly 
responded by pointing out in our advertising and PR that if 
customers ran our third-party Web server software on NT 
Workstation (a less expensive version of NT, which came without 
the IIS Web server software), they would end up with a more 
powerful server than Microsoft's IIS running on NT Server -- and it 
would cost less too.  

Much as it had done by bundling the browser with Windows 98, 
Microsoft was bundling an application -- the IIS Web server -- as part 
of an operating system, (NT Server). But in this case, the company 
offered another version of the same operating system without the 
bundle, (NT Workstation). It seemed natural to competitors to offer 
our products on top of the version of the operating system that came 
without IIS.  

It did not, however, please Microsoft that we did so. In June 1996 
Microsoft responded by changing the license to NT Workstation to 
prohibit its use as a server platform. (At first, the company went 
further, and actually crippled the version of TCP/IP provided in NT 
Workstation, but the outcry from users forced it to backtrack.)  

Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two 
different versions of NT, with different price points, and different 
functionality. But the company went a step further, and used its 
operating system license (and more specifically the license to the 
parts of the operating system that implemented TCP/IP, an industry 
standard protocol) to prohibit the use of third-party applications that 
duplicated the functionality of Microsoft's more expensive platform.  

Microsoft's public rationale for the policy -- that it was protecting its 
customers because NT Workstation was not suitable for use as a 
server operating system -- was proven false by my colleague, 
former O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman (working with Mark 
Russinovich). Shulman and Russinovich demonstrated that it was 
possible to convert NT Workstation to NT Server by changing only a 
few registry entries. NT Workstation contained all of the same 
program code as NT Server; the code was simply disabled, and 
some additional applications bundled.  

It's unfortunate that Judge Jackson wasn't aware of this 1996 use of 
the registry to suppress NT Server functionality in NT Workstation. 
He might have enjoyed the irony of Microsoft's complaint about a 
Justice Department attempt to disable Internet Explorer in Windows 
98:  

"Microsoft contends that [the Justice Department consultant, 
Princeton University Professor Edward] Felten's prototype removal 
program does not remove Internet Explorer's Web browsing 
functionalities, but rather 'hides' those functionalities from the 
perspective of the user," reads paragraph 183 of Judge Jackson's 
findings. "In support of that contention, Microsoft points out that 
Felten's program removes only a small fraction of the code in 
Windows 98, so that the hard drive still contains almost all of the 
code that had been executed in the course of providing Internet 
Explorer's Web browsing functionalities."  

This is just what Microsoft itself did on NT three years earlier. If 
editing the registry to hide functionality, and offering two versions of 
an operating system -- one with, and one without a bundled 
application -- was an acceptable business strategy then, why was it 
not possible to do the same thing to produce a version of Windows 
98 without an integrated browser?  

The main point is that in each case, Microsoft used its power over 
the operating system to tilt the playing field in its favor, doing its 
utmost to crush the competition in a hotly contested Internet 
application area. In the browser arena, Microsoft bundled a browser 
into the operating system that runs most of the world's PCs and then 
created obstacles for Netscape to package its browser on new PCs. 
In the server arena, Microsoft used a very similar tactic; it bundled 
the IIS Web server software with the NT operating system and then 
created roadblocks and financial disincentives for NT users to use 
alternate server applications. As a result, Microsoft was able to 
reserve the greatest slice of Web server space on NT for itself.  

But Microsoft's operating system is not nearly as entrenched in the 
server world as it is in that of the PC. So, once the company 
effectively blocked third-party Web server vendors on NT, Microsoft 
next set its sights not just on servers that ran NT, but on all Web 
servers. It was widely reported that during the summer of 1996 (that 
same summer that Microsoft revised its NT Workstation license to 
disallow its use as a server platform), Bill Gates told securities 
analysts that he considered Apache, rather than Netscape, to be his 
company's chief competitor in the Web server space. And of course, 
by then, he was right.  

Microsoft's IIS is today the number two Web server -- with 25 
percent market share to Apache's 54 percent, according to an 
October survey conducted by Netcraft. But for the Justice 
Department scrutiny, might not Microsoft have mounted an all-out 
attack next on the open source technologies and open protocols of 
the Web?  

The infamous "Halloween Documents," internal Microsoft 
documents analyzing a possible response to Linux describe a 
strategy of "extending" the "commodity protocols" on which open 
source projects depend, as a way of denying open source an entry 
into the market.  

Whether or not the same tricks Microsoft used against Netscape in 
both the browser and server markets would have worked against 
Apache, we'll never know. However, it is clear that if not for Apache's 
continued dominance on the server side, the protocols and APIs on 
which the Web depends would have belonged almost entirely to 
Redmond. (The Apache Group's firm embrace of open standards is 
one of the great unsung stories of the Web, and a key part of the 
magic that has kept its innovation alive.)  

I don't think people realize just how close we came to a Microsoft-
dominated Web. If Microsoft, having trounced Netscape, hadn't been 
surprised by the unexpected strength of Apache, Perl, FreeBSD and 
Linux, I can easily imagine a squeeze play on Web protocols and 
standards, which would have allowed Microsoft to dictate terms to 
the Web developers who are currently inventing the next generation 
of computer applications.  

It reminds me a bit of World War II. France (Netscape) has fallen, 
and the Battle of Britain is being fought for the Web, with the 
stalwart resistance of the Apache Group holding up the juggernaut 
till the rest of the free world can get its act together. Whether Linux 
and the rest of the open source movement, or the Justice 
Department and the courts, play the role of America, I leave to 
history to determine.

Copyright © 1999 Salon.com





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