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When elephants fight, the proverb says, it's the grass that suffers. When the elephants in question happen to be Netscape and Microsoft, however, the grass doesn't so much suffer as get smoked by the bale. And the rest of us? Depending on your tolerance, either giggle fits or mild to pronounced drowsiness.
It certainly takes an altered state of consciousness to understand the market-share debate antitheatrics currently crawling their way through the industry press. Admittedly, there's some hazy logic to Netscape's claim that the recent Dataquest survey - which showed IE growing to a 39 percent share and Netscape shrinking to 57 percent - was flawed, depending as it did on a single search engine, AltaVista. But rather than simply stating that AltaVista users aren't representative of the Net as a whole, period, the arguments descended into cosmic depths of illogic.
Netscape's frazzled elaboration proceeded thus: Because Netscape's search page doesn't provide a high-profile link to AltaVista, AltaVista-based samples yield unfair results. "You have to scroll down to get to it," said Netscape director of client marketing Dave Rothschild. Nevermind that AltaVista gets the same basement-placement treatment from Microsoft. As a bonus nevermind, ignore the fact that Wired's own HotBot also gets bottom-scraping positioning from both companies - meaning that the two highest-rated and -regarded search engines are, at best, minor footnotes on the two most popular search pages. What's more absurd is Netscape's revised tally using four of its klieg-light partners - Excite, Infoseek, LookSmart, and Yahoo. Hey, why not just count the browser share at Netscape.com and release those numbers?
Microsoft held up its end of the smokeout by introducing the issue of IE-defaulted AOL users. According to IE marketing director Yusuf Mehdi, they were included in the AltaVista survey but omitted from the Netscape numbers. Huh? It would require a supple logic indeed for Netscape to justify intentionally filtering out this bloc, and it would criminally violate credulity to claim this mass of users can successfully evade - or be made to evade - Yahoo, Excite, and Infoseek en masse.
Do the AOL users count, even if their browser choice was largely made for them? And how. But did they? Probably, but that's beside the point. Just as Netscape could have convincingly argued that a study of AltaVista users does not a conclusive study make, Microsoft could easily make the claim that Netscape's counter-survey won't cool this locker-room heat, either - and remind the reporters that they have a dozen or so more duplicates back at home.
But that would be too easy. And right now might not be the best time to bogart the browser-dominance claims, in any case. Better to pack it, attack it, and pass it on before anyone starts paying too much attention. After all, it's only grass.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
