I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs.
In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.
Funny, that.
Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .
I recall a video essay years ago that made the case that the reason companies like Bell and RCA were so successful and produced so many R&D products was because the tax code incentivized reinvesting profits into the company, and the pursuit of patents to license to other companies specializing in manufacturing as a means of revenue as opposed to vertical conglomerates. Wish I'd bookmarked it, because they did an excellent job citing sources as well.
My subjective experiences tell me that, just like the early days of the microcomputer revolution, anything is possible with talented nerds who don't have to worry about grinding at their day jobs to survive. Early markets are often defined by those with the privilege to innovate absent the need to work to survive, and sharing the fruits of their labors with the masses because that's their entire intent - and that being able to live off of that income instead of a corporate gig was a nice bonus.
If you want more innovation, focus on eliminating societal precarity instead of slashing regulations or growing monopolies.
>Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition?
No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.
>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.
Edge is reskinned Chrome. Opera is also reskinned Chrome. The whole point of having multiple browsers is to get multiple competing implementations of web standards, so a single vendor can't force unilaterally force its features or its particular interpretation of a feature over the entire market.
We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.
> Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.
Doubt.
I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)
>We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper.
That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.
> Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.
Not sure if this is meant tongue-in-cheek.
Google very aggressively chased any 3rd-party Windows Phone apps out of town that were Google—services compatible, whilst refusing to release 1st party apps themselves.
Microsoft shares a fair part in the blame because they made developers switch frameworks like… 5 times (?) in the span of 3 OS versions. Not to mention the constant sunsetting of devices.
The UI was amazing though. All content and no dressing, performant on low-end hardware, had dark mode half a decade before Android / iOS.
Microsoft just didn't want it bad enough. It's a similar situation to when they joined the video game market, except they wanted that and took a loss to stay in the market and now are essentially the main console.
Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible
WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
> It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel
Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles.
As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.
What I was trying to say is that we only have a single kernel in the linux world without complaint, so having a single browser "kernel" (chromium) can be seen as a good thing. We have multiple distros (chrome, edge, brave, etc) for the browser as well
For what it’s worth, I have been making the exact same argument for a few years now. At this point, Blink has become the kernel for the web, so why not focus all our efforts there?
Hell, even Firefox could relatively easily swap to running on Blink since most of their UI these days is CSS+JS.
In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.
Funny, that.
Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .