Okay, the key to understanding this is not in terms of the Internet, but in the Intranet. I am not sure how many people are aware of this, but corporate American is moving in the direction of using web interfaces for their internal business. Five years ago, client-server was the hot commodity but the technology has moved on. Columbia, for example, would like to allow their employees to update their own personnel records. If you want to change your stock fund in the retirement plan, why not just bring it up on your web browser and change it yourself? The problem is that there has to be a standard interface. Will it be Netscape or will it be Microsoft? That is the question. Microsoft would give away their browser now, to get their foot in the door but down the road, they would begin to ratchet up the fees, once it is a monopoly. That is what corporate America discovered with IBM's integrated mainframe solutions. Microsoft has an identical business model and the corporate tops are very wary, after having been burned once. In reality, there is a lot of wasted effort in the software industry. There was no reason to have 25 different word-processing programs as there were a few years ago. Although there are some things about Winword that bug me, I can live with it. For an interesting discussion of alternatives to Microsoft, check out the article in Salon magazine by Ellen Ullman on Linux.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)