Thinking About Web Browsers and Stickiness (Premium)

After an interesting experiment this weekend, I might be returning to Google Chrome. But whatever happens, this episode was a good example of why stickiness matters so much to platform makers. And what can happen when your products aren't sticky enough.

So, what does it mean to be sticky?

Stickiness is an often hard-to-characterize aspect of a product or service that makes it difficult to switch to the competition. Building in stickiness is core to any platform. And all platform makers do this to some degree.

Stickiness takes many forms, of course. In a perfect world, you will love some product---say, a Sonos speaker--so much that you want to buy more of them. And in doing so, you are becoming a "Sonos household," at great expense, and are now less likely to switch to some other speakers. In part because Sonos is great. And in part, because doing so would be prohibitively expensive. Sonos is sticky.

Platform makers also game the system to make their products and services stickier. In the Microsoft world, for example, product bundling was about extending the stickiness of popular Microsoft products---Word, Windows, and so on---to other products and services. It's why the Microsoft Office suite exists, because users would otherwise be slow to embrace certain lesser-known Office offerings. And it's why Microsoft bundled a web browser, a media player, and a communications tool in Windows. It wasn't enough for Microsoft to just show up in these new markets. It extended the stickiness of popular products to new ones.

We see this in the smartphone world, too, of course. Google requires hardware makers to include key Google apps---and, as important, to make them the defaults---if they want the "full" Android experience with the Google Play Store (which they do). And it's why Apple doesn't allow users to configure non-Apple default apps in iOS: It lost the stickiness battle in the PC wars, and it doesn't want to make that mistake again.

On the flipside, I've argued that digital personal assistants are not all that sticky. That they should all work nearly identically and with whatever smart devices and services that you own. The stickiness there is in those other things, not in the assistants. And if were to switch from, say, Amazon Alexa to Google Assistant (or vice versa), I bet the transition would be easy and fairly seamless.

But what about web browsers?

When web browsers first appeared in the 1990s, they weren't particularly sticky in the sense that the web wasn't yet mature or full-featured. But sensing a possible extinction event for Windows, Microsoft moved quickly to bundle its own web browser, Internet Explorer, in Windows. (Apple later did the same on the Mac, and even Linux distributions will come with some default web browser.)

Microsoft's strategy worked, at least at first. And while it later ran afoul of antitrust regulators around the world, the damage was down: Netscape was defeated, and web browsing beca...