Patent loss creates pro-Microsoft alliances
Published: 26 Sep 2003 10:25 BST
But Microsoft's yearslong assault on the browser market reduced Netscape from a standard-bearer (with more than 80 percent of the market) to a neglected unit of AOL Time Warner, which recently spun off its browser division as a nonprofit foundation. Industry veterans say there is every reason to believe that Microsoft will survive this challenge as well.
Given the daunting odds in any challenge to Microsoft, Doyle believes that his struggle exceeds biblical proportions. He said the often-cited comparisons to David and Goliath don't go far enough in conveying the ambition and travails of his quest, which he believes could reverse Microsoft's victory in the so-called browser war and break its control over much of the digital world.
"'David versus Goliath' minimises what we're doing," Doyle said. "Microsoft's use of our technology has been to put others out of business and to restrict much of the potential of the Web. And that is limiting our ability to get the full value for things that we created."
Many software makers might have supported Eolas when Microsoft was more vulnerable to browser competition years ago, but they now say Doyle's efforts have come too late. Since IE rose to market dominance, many software companies have come to rely on the browser's plug-ins for their businesses.
"We're no big fan of Microsoft, but I'm a big fan of the Web," said Dougherty, who is in charge of online publishing at O'Reilly and testified on behalf of Microsoft in its recent patent trial. "What worries people is that this is the first successful patent offence on the Web, and lots of other things could be coming."
Some browser application makers look likely to come up with relatively easy workaround solutions. Adobe, for example, already offers two methods for reading a PDF (Portable Document Format) file that is posted on a Web page: one requires the IE technology to open a document within the Web browser, but the other shows the document in its Acrobat reader and therefore probably steers clear of the patent issue.
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