The success of alternative browsers such as Mozilla Foundation"s Firefox may ultimately have an unexpected side effect. It may be causing Microsoft to be more aggressive in leveraging its dominance of Internet client software, says Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of the browser company that Microsoft beat out in the late 1990s, Netscape Communications.
After Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape as the dominant Web client, browser innovation at Microsoft "pretty much stopped in 1998," Andreessen said during a session at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. This means that the company has not done all it could have done to use the browser to strengthen its other products, such as its MSN service, or to prevent competitive Internet companies such as Yahoo from growing, he says.