Why FireFox stands no chance against Explorer
Let’s make a prediction; this is not so common in management, even less in innovation management where 99% of the work is post-mortem analysis, with 20/20 hindsight. There’s been a lot of talk recently, including on this blog, about the FireFox phenomenon; FireFox is the open source Internet browser developed by the Mozilla foundation, recently reborn. It is a direct challenger to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which until recently had more than 97% market share.
There is no objective reason to switch from Explorer to FireFox. Of course, you will be told that FireFox is faster, easier to use thanks to a good design, and, last but not least in the times of fear and uncertainty, that it is more secure and less prone to attacks by viruses and other Trojan horses. But these advantage are quite meager. I have been using FireFox for several weeks now, and frankly, I don’t see much difference with Explorer. Only marginally, except of course that several important Web sites do not support FireFox, which is obviously annoying: what is more annoying in fact for a FireFox crusader than having to launch Explorer in parallel regularly in order to visit some Web sites and do real business? Based on this, I venture to predict FireFox’s failure to dislodge Explorer.