The battleground now shifts to corporate networks known as Intranets. They enable people within a company to share information and work collaboratively. These mini-Internets are controlled by servers, and in five years server software is expected to be a $10 billion business. Netscape believes that it will reap half of that loot. Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. And IBM, selling the most sophisticated groupware product, Lotus Notes, isn’t exactly crying uncle. What Netscape does have going for it is Internet expertise, which translates nicely to Intranets. It plans to keep its prices low. And its pitch to corporate buyers plays on a real fear: do you really want to buy all your software from Microsoft?
Meanwhile, the browser war ended with everyone a winner. Netscape boot-strapped itself into prominence. Microsoft proved it could mobilize itself to exploit the Internet. But plain old users won the most. What used to be known as browsers will now be tightly knit into our everyday software, and the boundaries between our own desktops and the rest of the world will vanish. Much like the browser war did.
