Is the browser too simple, too pure, to be undercut by MS?

Now that Firefox has reached 50 million downloads, it’s a good time to stop and reflect on the significance of the browser.

Once upon a time there were mainframes with wires to terminals, and world was a peaceful place. Then the wizards of Middle Earth created client-server architecture, and computing became filled with treachery — grand deceptions like tiers
and orientations, as if oriented-this or oriented-that added meaning simply because it was conceptually different than a non-oriented thing. Orientation was, and still is, no more than academics and software engineers (and even journalists) pontificating and obfuscating, projecting their petty logic as stupid orientation abstractions (SOA). Just tell it like it is — please.

In a breath of fresh air, the browser (and HTML) introduced global static publishing. People saw it and acknowledged it. They also needed it. If there had been a bigger budget and more meetings, certainly it would have been oriented somehow. Instead, the browser provided a simple, clean, oriented-nothing platform.