That's not what zero-sum implies; you don't have to run two browsers, or two OSes, to refute it.
The marketshare numbers you see are percentages. Say Netscape has 80% of the market of 1M people, and IE4 is popular enough that NS's share dwindles to 30% as IE's rises to 70%. If we're still dealing with 1M total users, the market is zero-sum in that NS's losses are exactly MS's gains.
My contention is that IE4 was so good for its time that it grew the overall internet market; instead of 1M casual users, we have, say, 5M. If NS's marketshare fell from 80% of 1M to 30% of 5M, their user base actually went from 800K to 1.5M. IE4 killed them in share, but helped the overall market and Netscape in particular, by users and revenue.
To assert that it was a zero-sum game is to assert that the market was inelastic relative to the available browsers, which seems ridiculous. Better browsers = more users.
The marketshare numbers you see are percentages. Say Netscape has 80% of the market of 1M people, and IE4 is popular enough that NS's share dwindles to 30% as IE's rises to 70%. If we're still dealing with 1M total users, the market is zero-sum in that NS's losses are exactly MS's gains.
My contention is that IE4 was so good for its time that it grew the overall internet market; instead of 1M casual users, we have, say, 5M. If NS's marketshare fell from 80% of 1M to 30% of 5M, their user base actually went from 800K to 1.5M. IE4 killed them in share, but helped the overall market and Netscape in particular, by users and revenue.
To assert that it was a zero-sum game is to assert that the market was inelastic relative to the available browsers, which seems ridiculous. Better browsers = more users.