"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

--George Bernard Shaw

Bob Kahn & Vinton Cerf drafted a paper describing their network design, titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" in 1973 which went on to become the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee's invention at CERN, the particle acceleration lab in Switzerland, that created "hyperlinks" within text, helped create the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, the same time Kahn & Cerf were overseeing the Internet's foray into the commercial world.

The Internet grew by leaps & bounds & now since then & consists of 605m people now. Actually the continent where the number of online users is growing by leaps & bounds is Asia. North American Internet population has stagnated since the last few months. Europe is the continent with the highest number of Internet users at 191m, followed by Asia Pacific & North America. The applications have not changed much though. The Internet is like the car, which got invented but had no roads to run on. The infrastructure needed is vast. Korea has the kind of broadband access required to make the Internet an experience. It has 4% of the Internet population though, making it unattractive to make broadband applications. 10% of the Internet users are in Japan who surf through 3G mobile phones. Surveys now say Americans are not interested to access the net through mobile devices in the future.

Browser War

In August 1994, Spyglass received the exclusive commercial license for Marc Andreessen's 'Mosaic' from NCSA. Mosaic, first released by NCSA in 1993, was the first graphical Web browser and quickly became quite popular. In 1994, Spyglass granted Microsoft a non-exclusive license that gave Microsoft the right, among other things, to include software based on Mosaic as part of its upcoming Window 95 operating system product. At the same time in 1994, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, signed up Andreessen and most of the Mosaic development team for a new company in California, Mosaic Communications Corporation. This was soon renamed Netscape Communications Corporation to avoid a lawsuit from the university. Thus were born the browser siblings, Internet Explorer & Netscape Navigator.

The browser war is over. Internet Explorer is the clear winner. It gained ground with every release (in fact 2 major versions, IE 1.0 & IE 2.0 were released within a period of 2 months). Today, a browser is no longer a program governed by HTTP & rendering pages according to the HTML code. It now needs to understand Javascript, cookies, Java, ActiveX, Flash, frames, cascading style sheets, XML… the list goes on. The entry costs are high today. The writing is on the wall. Another browser war is unlikely. Overall, Microsoft Internet Explorer has a total share of 94.6 percent of the market (IE 6.0 at 52%, IE 5.5 at 20.9% & IE 5.0 at 19.7%). Netscape Navigator has a 3% share (NN 4.0 with 1.2%, NN 7.0 with 0.5%, rest of the versions with 1.3%) and Opera with 0.9% share. This is good news for website designers. Making web pages work in both browsers had always been difficult due to limited conformance to standards. With a 3% market share, its not worth the effort anymore, or so it seems at first glance. Germany, Switzerland & Canada (in that order) have the highest number of Netscpae users. A large portion of the 3% Netscape users can be found in these countries. If your target customers happen to be from these countries, the message at the bottom of the page (This page best viewed in IE x.x & above) may not go well with them. Fortunately, browsers are becoming standardized. Netscape 6 & Internet Explorer 5 and 6 follow the rules.

Online Presence

A company website has become an integral part of business. Its relatively easier to set up a website today. Its much more difficult to meet customer expectations though. One-third of companies take three days or longer to get back to customers, around 52 percent of initial responses are answered within 24 hours, but only 32 percent provided a response within six hours, which is what the customers demand today. Customer expectations rise with improved technology. Adopting the technology is not an end in itself. As more & more of your customers get net savvy & start using the net as a preferred mode of communication, getting your employees to be customer centric will be a challenge.

Global reach, Local flavor

Reaching out to a population of 600 million plus users, the Internet no more remains English user dominant. Only 36.5 percent of the global online population is native English speakers (Source: Global Reach). Chinese speakers who comprise 10.8 percent of the world's Internet users are growing fast with an Internet of their own. They are followed by the Japanese, Spanish, German and Korean speakers in that order. If the aim of your website is to cater to a global audience, its high time you got your site up in other languages. Translation is only part of the story. Being culturally sensitive is more important (& difficult). The Internet can be used effectively here once again. Contact foreign translators (for the language you intend to translate in) by searching for them on the net. The criteria for evaluation then would be their proficiency in English, which is of course easier to judge. Get a website design firm in that country to realign the theme & colors used.

Online Advertising

Internet marketers had had a tough time on the net. Online advertising sales fell by 22 percent in the first six months of the year, compared with 2001. The earliest forms of Internet advertising like banner ads are experiencing a drop in spendings while newer forms of advertising like search term based ads in search engines are gaining popularity. The amount of innovation in this field is immense. Cross-media optimization is something that companies are learning by trial & error. No wonder there have been success stories as well as failures. As companies learn to reach out to online users projecting the picture they have been portraying in the traditional media & harness the unique capabilities of the medium, online advertising will provide better returns on marketing investment. Till then media companies will remain the giants of the online advertising world. The top 10 media companies, which includes Yahoo, America Online and MSN account for 76 percent of the $3 billion advertiser spending so far this year.

References:
Nua Internet Services, Global Reach, WebSideStory's StatMarket,
Newsfactor network, Jupiter Research, Interactive Advertising Bureau,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, US district court, (Columbia) declaration by Tim Krauskopf, co-founder, Spyglass, Inc. (Microsoft anti-trust case), Netscape Communications Corp.

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