The Modern Trojan Horse Strategy

The Browser Wars and the Hollow Horse

At the dawn of the public internet in the mid-1990s, the gateway to this new world was the web browser. And the undisputed king of that world was a company called Netscape. Its browser, Netscape Navigator, was the portal through which millions first experienced the World Wide Web. It was a paid product for businesses, and its success was so staggering that it seemed poised to become the central platform of the digital age, a threat to even the biggest titans of technology. One of those titans was Microsoft. The company had built a fortress around its Windows operating system, which ran on over 90% of the world's personal computers. Netscape's rise represented a fundamental threat. If the browser became the main way people interacted with software, the underlying operating system—Microsoft's crown jewel—would become less relevant. Microsoft’s response was a masterstroke of Trojan Horse strategy. Instead of trying to build a better browser and selling it, they built their own—Internet Explorer—and gave it away for free. More than that, they bundled it directly into the Windows operating system. The "gift" was irresistible. For consumers buying a new PC, the browser was already there, integrated and ready. There was no need to go out and buy Netscape Navigator. The horse was already inside the city walls. The result was the decimation of Netscape. Microsoft leveraged its dominance in one market (operating systems) to conquer another (browsers). While the move led to a landmark antitrust lawsuit, which argued that Microsoft was illegally stifling competition, the strategic damage was done. By the time the courts intervened, the war was largely over. Microsoft hadn't charged the gates head-on; it had delivered a free, convenient gift that users willingly, almost unconsciously, accepted. And once inside, that gift fundamentally reshaped the landscape of the internet.