However, there is a video that kind of conveys how awesome it was.

And remember, “Bricks don’t hit back!”

As Yoda might say, “Ended, the browser wars have…”

AOL has end-of-life’d the Netscape browser.

Here’s a little background on why this is significant.

Netscape was the first company during the Internet era to challenge the desktop computing paradigm that made Bill Gates and the denizens of Microsoft so incredibly wealthy during the 80’s and early 90’s.

Of course, it’s 2008 folks and folks have short memories.

For example, how many of you remember that, before 9/11, the scariest threat we were facing was a potential conflict with China, which seemed incredibly likely after they “escorted” one of our spy planes down and returned it to us chopped up in little pieces?

So the public tends to have a short memory, and details are often lost when the collective consciousness is gorged on big, life-changing events like 9/11.

So let’s start at the beginning…

The world wide web, as you know it, is the creation of Tim Berners-Lee, not Al Gore.

To be more precise, the magic that occurs when you type in a web address, like http://www.neobeans.com/blog and see a website appear is what Sir Berners-Lee is responsible for.

The web is actually a combination of four things:

1. A standard for how documents are formatted called HTML. When you look at a web page, I hazard a guess that 99.999% of the time, it’s HTML. You can learn more about what HTML looks like at w3schools.com.
   
   That said, I still argue with friends about whether we accidentally created the hyperlink when we created a “disk-based news magazine for Atari ST owners” that allowed folks to click on icons or text to link to articles.
2. A client application, called a browser. This is where you’re probably using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. These programs know how to render HTML, and also know how to make requests to…
3. A server program, called a web server, which runs on a computer and allows documents to be requested from that machine via a URL. When you surf to http://www.neobeans.com/index.html, there is an instance of the Apache web server running on a machine whose name is www.neobeans.com, and your browser is asking for a document named /index.html.
4. Finally, to choreograph the dance between the browser and the server, and to describe all of the ways the browser can make a request and the server may respond to it, Berners-Lee created a protocol called HTTP.

That said, circa 1993 or so, the web itself was pretty minimal, but folks realized early on that there was not a lot of value to serving up static documents. The big shift came when folks figured out how to run small applications on the server in response to client requests.

For example, when you log in to your favorite social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, and OKCupid, you’re sending requests for “documents” that happen to kick off small “programs” that typically go out to some database, do a search for information that you care about, and then they create an HTML page on the fly to show you the results. Looking at a list of products when you do a search for big screen TVs on Amazon.com is no different than getting a list of hotties on Match.com based the fact that you’re looking for a single, female, non-smoker who likes long walks on the beach and margaritas.

Netscape’s claim to fame was the Netscape browser, which was regarded the “best” game in town until Microsoft began flexing their monopolistic muscle and began actively improving Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s interest in making a “better browser” was likely not just about building a better browser, but about controlling the client experience. They were likely more concerned about the fact that folks were beginning to think that the web browser might usher in a new paradigm that could replace the desktop computing paradigm that had made Microsoft rich.

Even more importantly, with the advent of more advanced client-side technologies, such as Java and JavaScript, and Flash, clients could also be treated to a user experience that was rich enough to cause folks to wonder if they would ultimately care about what sort of computer they had on their desktop, which could threaten Microsoft’s monopoly on operating systems. Interestingly enough, Microsoft’s behavior at this time to squelch the Netscape browser and Sun’s Java technology wound up getting them scrutinized in anti-trust court, where the penalties could have led to the splitting up of the company in to smaller entities, the same way AT&T was once split up in to the Baby Bells.

So what happened next? Well, I’ll write more about that in Part 2…

2) Surf to get.opensolaris.org to request a free copy on DVD. It’s completely free and does not even require you to pay shipping.

I’ve been thinking about the Apple iPhone on and off all day, and I have come to the realization that it’s impending release is going to be incredibly disruptive to the status quo in the cell phone industry, but it will snake through the entire IT industry and perhaps allow Apple to perform an end-around Microsoft using a technique that, ironically, has served Microsoft well in its battle in new and emerging markets.

In short, Apple is raising the bar so high in the cell phone marketplace that competitors will have a tough time matching up, simply because their “legacy” aims too low — their platforms were not designed to be as rich and as functional as the iPhones, and as a result, software for those platforms is diluted to play on the “lowest common denominator”.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been watching this play out between Microsoft Windows Mobile (née Windows CE aand Pocket PC) and Palm OS.

Palm was the undisputed leader in the PDA marketplace in the days before cell phones began taking on the functionality of PDAs. They were lauded for being elegant and simple, and, like the Mac and the iPod, they “just worked”. It also had geek appeal with the ability to wirelessly beam data to your peers over infrared. Palm PDAs balanced performance, size, and battery life.

When Microsoft made their first foray into the PDA marketplace, it appeared to be classic Microsoft: bloated, buggy, and woefully inept at performing the core functions of a PDA well. The common criticism was that Microsoft was trying to wedge a desktop operating system (Windows) in to a device that simply was not powerful enough to handle it. PDA processors, memory, and battery life could not support the demands a full-fledge OS like WIndows CE brought to the table.

Then the hardware began to improve, and Palm OS simply could not “scale up” to take advantage of the new features. This became obvious to me when I saw the split in functionality between Sony Clîe devices and the rest of the PalmOS-based PDAs. PalmOS was not reeally ready for prime time, and much like Apple during their System 9 days, they found themselves with an underpowered operating system that simply could not perform up to the expectations of users whose needs had exceeded the elegant and simple requirements that were present at the inception of the PDA market.

You can look at the various releases of PalmOS over the past few years, but the promised “Linux-based” PalmOS 6 with multimedia capabilities possibly culled from the defunct BeOS has yet to materialize in any PDA or cell phone. For all the success they’ve had, Palm still ships the Treo line with PalmOS 5 variants. PalmOS has been evolving, but it’s obvious that outside of the Treo smartphones, PalmOS has given way to Windows Mobile… simply because Windows Mobile delivers a richer platform for developers and integrators to build applications upon.

Like most people, I felt that Microsoft, by entering the market late, had been able to aim higher and wait for hardware to catch up to their vision, and simply fight a war of attrition with the expectation that PalmOS would fail simply because Windows CE / Windows Mobile would eventually win out as rich mobile applications demanded more of a platform than what Palm could offer. Quite frankly, despite Palm’s protestations to the contrary, when they released the Palm Treo 700w which ran Windows Mobile, they were essentially running up the white flag to surrender because they were acknowledging that there were some things Windows Mobile was clearly better at. Sure, on the surface, it was all about “synching to Microsoft Exchange” and “leveraging the mobile versions of Microsoft Office”, but really… that class of application simply does not exist (at least not in an elegant form!) on PalmOS.

RIM’s Blackberry, for all of its vaunted coolness, is really a glorified e-mail client + cell phone. As a platform for developers, it’s not far removed from the Palm platform.

Enter Apple, fashionably late.

If you look at what Apple is doing, they are aiming to provide an experience far beyond what Microsoft’s Mobile platform has been pitching to developers. In fact, if you look at it, you’ll see that the iPhone is running Mac OS X — the same operating system as the PowerMac G5 I’m typing this blog entry on. The same operrating system that also runs on my Mac Mini G4 and my MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processors. It’s an operating system with roots in the FreeBSD operating system, so it has the rich heritage and stability of a UNIX-variant, but it also has powerful multimedia capabilities courtesy of Apple’s longstanding efforts to provide a platform for content developers (artists) and consumers.

Think about the desktop applications that demonstrate Apple’s commitment to being a multimedia platform — Quicktime. iTunes. iPhoto. iMovie.

But it’s not just the operating system that is impressive. Look at the functionality demonstrated on the iPhone… it has rich graphical capabilities in its core applications. Look at the “Widescreen iPod” example on Apple’s website — the “CoverFlow” may seem to be pure eye candy, but it hints at a powerful platform for application developers. The “lowest common denominator” in the world of iPhone applications is pretty frickin’ powerful, and it’ll be fun to explore how much of the desktop Mac OS X has made its way into the iPhone. It will be interesting to see if CoreImage, CoreAudio, OpenGL, OpenAL, and other APIs developers use for writing desktop applications for Mac OS X are enabled on the iPhone, because if they are….

Long term, we’re looking at a mobile platform that will cause other cell phone makers and carriers to step up the plate to deliver a more powerful integrated platform for developers to create mashups. The key is for Apple and Cingular to keep the platform open enough to allow developers to deploy applications on to the iPhone… something we’re not sure will happen at this time.

People have been underestimating the importance of Apple’s ability to forge alliances: notice that Steve Jobs shared the stage at MacWorld with the CEO’s of Yahoo! and Google, as well as Cingular. To “get it right”, Apple needed to get buy-in from all of these players to make this platform compelling to end-users, who in turn would see Yahoo!, Google, and Cingular as holding a clear competitive advantage over other providers. Only Apple could have had the pull (and the audacity) to get Cingular to rework their voice mail system to suit the way the device needed to work. Only Apple could get both Yahoo! and Google to the table to help bring Web 2.0 to mobile devices.

Of course looking ahead to the future… the next generation will be true peer-to-peer (P2P) applications where mobiles devices cooperate to the benefit of their owners to perform tasks. Social networking. Agent-based computing. Spontaneous networks of mobile devides (not just phones!), working on behalf of their owners, to get things done. I’ll write more on this later, but the bottom line is that the next generation of applications won’t be “hosted” by Google or Yahoo!, but on devices that cooperate to work together, much like a dynamic grid of computers.

Imagine the power of a “hivemind” of devices that continuously work on behalf of users, making requests of nearby devices and their owners to allow people to share information, transact socially, and even do a bit of commerce to pay the bills… all based on proximity, all leveraging a platform that uses standards-based technologies.

Of course, at that point, we’re going to need the ability to do servers, and that means it will only be a matter of time before you see elements of a service infrastructure running on your cell phone.

And I, for one, am curious as to whether I’ll be able to run WebLogic Server on an iPhone…

..and I see our advertising taking this to heart, even to our business cards:

…and then I see this Dinosaur comic:

A picture of Single View of Terrorist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSuspect in the BEA Public Sector Booth at BEA World 2006. That’s Bridgette from our marketing team standing next to the display…

I just wanted to toot my own horn a bit… I had the privilege of attending BEA World 2006 and showing the Single View of Suspect demo which demos the use of a bunch fo BEA products — namely WebLogic Portal, WebLogic Integration, AquaLogic Data Services Platform, and WebLogic Server. Oh, and some partner products in the form of Modus Operandi Wave and CollabraSpace’s CollabraSuite (which is now AJAX-based! Sweet! Big shout out to Sarah Meehan for helping me integrate it into Portal 9.2!).

One of our sales guys (Steve McNally) almost got booked by the system. Good thing for him that I know he’s not a terrorist!

Overall, BEA World 2006 was fun. I’m not going to astroturf in my blog a lot about it, but I enjoyed running into customers (especially Wil Adams, who also helped me grok what’s going on down in New Orleans as they rebuild) and drinking copious amounts of corporate Kool-Aid about the new SOA 360 and Workspace 360 Mmmm. Delicious.

We used lots of shiny objects to evangelize our product line up. We’re on step away from wearing black turtlenecks and doing everything MacWorld-style…

I’d be looking for a job if I treated my customers like that. Wow.

I have become death, the destroyer of worlds…

But here’s something most people don’t know… benchmarks are showing that the MacBook Pro runs Windows faster than any currently released Windows laptop.

Check it out here….