From: snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 14:01:02 +0800
To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [Long] A history of Netscape/MSIE problems
In-Reply-To: <84279182110737@cs26.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.93.960915164109.1513A-100000@smoke.suba.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Mon, 16 Sep 1996 pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote:
> >`any publicity is good publicity' syndrome.  There was a *lot* of publicity,
> >and Netscapes response in fixing the problem was good.  Several US cypherpunks
> >were tracking the stocks at the time, and could probably verify this.
> Interesting... does anyone want to comment on this?  This kind of damages one
> of my assumptions in the paper that publicity attacks can hurt a company
> providing poor security.  Could it be that at the time people would buy
> Netscape stock no matter what happened?  If MSIE had been widespread at the
> time, would it have caused people to jump ship en masse?

     I think one issue that may come into this is that while the kind of peopl
who read this list worry about security issuse like the above, the average, or
rather most (I'd off-the-cuff estimate almost all) of the users of netscape
don't use the security features, and don't understand them. If they know what
they are doing, they expect that at some point in the future NEED the security,
but don't use/need it now. 
  
     What publicity Netscape recieved was probably very minor in the
mainstream media, and Netscapes damage control was most likely quite effective.
I spend very little time with the mainstream media, I really don't know. 

     I could be very very wrong about most or all of this, but I think that 
people on this list would tend to be just a little bit more concerned and 
knowlegable about security and privacy issues, and hence a little more 
judemental (in a good way) on those issues. 
 
Petro, Christopher C.
petro@suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff>
snow@smoke.suba.com