The internet

Alive and kicking Sep 23rd 2004 From The Economist print edition

Competition still exists on the web

JUST when you thought you knew the web, along come new competitors to keep things interesting. On September 15th, a new search engine called A9.com was unveiled by Amazon, the giant internet retailer. It repackages Google’s search results, but with useful tweaks. Searches not only call up websites and images on the same page, but other references, such as Amazon’s book search, the Internet Movie Database, and encyclopaedia and dictionary references. Moreover, it keeps track of users’ search histories—an important innovation as search becomes more personalised.

Many had assumed the market was stitched up by Google and Yahoo! (who account for over 90% of searches), barring the expected entrance of Microsoft. Likewise, the market for online music seemed settled: Apple’s iTunes is the leader, its main rivals being RealNetworks and Microsoft’s MSN Music. Yet this, too, understates the potential for battle. Last week, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch, an online music retailer and software firm, for $160m. Music downloads are now worth roughly $310m annually but are forecast to grow to $4.6 billion by 2008, according to Forrester Research, so there is room for new firms to sprout.

Meanwhile, the most surprising new competition is in web browsers. Microsoft was the undisputed champ( Informal：=A champion), after bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system in the 1990s and destroying Netscape. However, Microsoft’s browser is so vulnerable to attacks by online crooks and various troublemakers that the American and German governments have recommended that users consider alternatives. This has been a boon to two small browser-makers, Opera, a Norwegian software company, and Mozilla, which developed the Firefox browser based on an open-source version of Netscape. Firefox boasted 1m downloads within 100 hours of its release on September 14th.

Security has become the main competitive difference. The software of both Opera and Mozilla is considered safer (partly because they have fewer users and so are a less attractive target for hackers). Microsoft’s share of the browser market has actually shrunk over the past three months from around 96% to 94%. It is a highly symbolic phenomenon, albeit a modest decrease. Even Google is thought to be toying with the idea of launching its own browser.

Underlying this ripple of competition is the ability of large companies that already benefit from economies of scale to extend into new areas, says Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. That explains Amazon’s A9 search service and Yahoo!’s move into music. As for browsers, “Microsoft had a lock on the market and just dropped the ball. Microsoft hasn’t provided any innovation in the browser area and they had poor security,” he says. The message: watch your back.(1—俗语：擦亮你的眼睛;2—Microsoft的一款软件，用来阻挡可疑信息或过大邮件。这里一语双关，反讽十足。)

就在你以为已经对网络了如指掌时，新的竞争者又让情形妙趣横生。9月15日，网络零售业巨头Amazon发布了一个名为A9.com的搜索引擎。它把Google的搜索结果重新包装，并进行有益的整合。搜索到的不仅仅是网址和图片，还有其他相关内容，比如，加入了Amazon书籍搜索、IMDb的电影搜索、相关百科全书和字典等。此外，它还能保留用户的搜索记录—这是一项重要的创新，使搜索更加个性化。

许多人曾经以为，搜索市场已经被Google和Yahoo!瓜分殆尽(二者已占领了搜索引擎的90%的市场)，除非是将来Microsoft会加入。与此相似，在线音乐的市场似乎也已被分割成型：Apple的iTunes占据老大，其主要竞争对手有RealNetworks和Microsoft的MSN Music。然而，这也同样低估了竞争的规模。上周，Yahoo!以1亿6千万美元收购了Musicmatch，一家经销在线音乐的软件企业。如今每年网络音乐下载交易约为3亿1千万美元，而根据Forrester Research的预测，到2008年这一数字将增至46亿美元，因此，仍有很大的空间供新公司参与。

与此同时，最令人称奇的当属网络浏览器的新一轮竞争。Microsoft在90年代将IE集成到Windows操作系统中并成功击败了Netscape之后就是毋庸置疑的冠军了。然而，Microsoft的浏览器太容易受到在线骗子们和形形色色的捣乱者的攻击，以致于美国和德国政府都已经建议用户考虑一下其他产品。这对于挪威软件公司Opera和在Netscape一个公开源代码版本基础上开发了Firefox浏览器的Mozilla这两个小的浏览器制造商来说显然是个利好。Firefox在9月14日发布后仅100小时以内就创下了100万次下载的骄人战绩。

安全问题成了竞争的焦点。通常认为Opera和Mozilla的软件更安全些，(一定程度上是因为用户很少，所以对黑客来说，有吸引力的目标就更少)。在过去三个月里，Microsoft在浏览器市场所占份额的确是缩水了，从96%左右降至94%。虽然降得很少，却意义重大。就连Google都被认为会有心投放自己的浏览器，自娱自乐一番。

U.C.Berkeley的经济学家Hal Varian认为：暗藏在表面竞争之下的是那些已经从规模经济向新领域的扩张中获益的大公司之间的能力之争。这就是为什么Amazon提供A9搜索服务，以及Yahoo!为什么转向音乐。至于浏览器，“Microsoft的市场封锁恰恰犯了个大忌。其在浏览器方面没有任何创新，安全性能极差，”敬告：擦亮你的眼睛。