Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/10/27/2009102700899.html

by bensummers • 17 years ago

25 27 17 years ago

english.chosun.com

alexandros2• 17 years ago

Apparently it was (is?) a legal requirement to use ActiveX

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-kor...

nkassis• 17 years ago

Weird, I was under the impression that South Korea was a free market type place. And why would they only allow ActiveX to used? What would happen if a sited decided to use something else to offer the same functionality? Would they get fined?

Kuytu• 17 years ago

I wouldn't necessarily call South Korea "free market", since there seems to be a lot of protectionism. Everyone who has been to Korea has probably noticed that almost everyone drives Korean cars and uses Korean phones. Taking that into consideration it seems quite odd that the government has tied the infrastructure to one vendor(which is not Korean).

idlewords• 17 years ago

Monopolies are a natural phenomenon in unregulated markets. Not sure why you think this situation could not arise in a free market.

ahpeeyem2• 17 years ago

This sounds like what could have happened everywhere had AJAX and web 2.0 not happened. I remember the early 2000s when ActiveX seemed like one of few options to deliver functionality that wasn't thought possible with just HTML and Javascript - and it was even reasonable to go ahead and use it because everyone was on IE6 anyway.

Dark days.

Edit: Oh, it's actually law! Oh my...

DougBTX• 17 years ago

XMLHttpRequest is an ActiveX control in IE6...

bensummers2• 17 years ago

But it's installed by default and doesn't require the user to download random code or say "yes" to running it.

ahpeeyem2• 17 years ago

Sorry I was referring more to the cultural or mindset change that made it cool and trendy to build Web 2.0 style apps. Events like the coining of the term "AJAX", as well as things like Google Maps and Gmail really pushing the boundaries of what everyone perceived could be done with just HTML/CSS/Javascript.

My theory was that the mindset shift didn't happen in South Korea for whatever reason, meaning nobody moved away from ActiveX - but as it turns out, that reason is legislative.

mrbuwch• 17 years ago

What I find most interesting about this article is the following irony: All of the security software in use causes users to habitually click Yes on any dialog any that comes up.

mhansen• 17 years ago

Is there any explanation as to why? Are other vendors not internationalizing sufficiently to get traction in Korea?

This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that would spring up without reason.

henrikschroder• 17 years ago

It looks like classic vendor lock-in. Some bank starts requiring ActiveX to log in at a time when IE had over 90% of the marketshare, soon all banks require it, and all Koreans that wanted to use an internet bank switched to IE because that was easiest.

And then everyone else designing web services in Korea knows that since everyone uses IE, they don't bother optimizing or even testing their web sites in anything but IE.

So when Firefox appears on the market, none of the bank websites work, and plenty of regular websites don't work or look like shit in it, so users never bother with it. It's a negative spiral.

Contrast that with the development in Sweden where I am: I switched banks in 1999 to one with a really good internet bank that used standard client certificates. It worked in all browsers on all platforms. Some other banks had mediocre internet services, some had services that required the users to install something proprietary windows-only, and some banks used a hardware authenticator. The ones with bad compatibility, the ones that didn't work on Mac or in Netscape got a lot of flak from consumers, and the ones with compatibility won all the awards and got a lot of good press and goodwill.

That was instead a positive spiral, and today the technologies that survived are standard client certificates or hardware authenticators, and it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all internet banks here are usable by everyone.

dagw• 17 years ago

it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all internet banks here are usable by everyone.

If only the same where true for the government websites. Taxes and various social services webpages are still more or less impossible to log in to without windows and IE (don't know how it is with Macs though).

robin_reala2• 17 years ago

South Korea developed an online infrastructure fairly early and wanted encrypted transmissions. At the time the US was restricting the export of decent encryption as 'weapons grade' so South Korea came up with it’s own encryption standard called SEED. Because the browsers of the time didn’t support this natively the South Korean government created plugins to enable the functionality: an ActiveX one for IE and an NSAPI(?) one for Netscape 4.

Fast forward and Netscape 4 dies, leaving the plugin unloved and unmaintained. IE achieves market dominance and banks / shops etc start assuming that that’ll be the browser used. Now, when Gecko and Webkit start making inroads outside of South Korea they still don’t have native SEED support which means they can’t be used for secure transactions on the inside. SEED is mandated by the government along with the use of secure transactions for certain operations (online banking for one), so by proxy the use of the ActiveX plugin and therefore Internet Explorer.

Work was recently done to provide Firefox with native SEED support ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839 ) and that should make it in for Firefox 3.6. I guess then we’ll see whether it’s possible for a non-IE browser to gain any market share. Of course, the years of a Microsoft monoculture have caused problems with regards to building sites using web standards…

reedlaw• 17 years ago

It's basically the same in China, although more Mac stores are opening up. Linux is virtually unheard of.

alexandros2• 17 years ago

what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux ?

FooBarWidget• 17 years ago

Almost nobody uses it.

bensummers2• 17 years ago

I wonder if there's a market for something which automatically sandboxes ActiveX controls. Isn't there a YC company which is doing something for applications which might be able to be reused?

EDIT: Of course, doing the marketing to convince people they need it is probably more challenging than the technical work.

akamaka• 17 years ago

To be fair, Microsoft invested a lot more into catering for Korean users than anyone else.

Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's computer, and found out that he couldn't properly type Korean in his webmail program, while IE worked fine. You can guess what browser he decided to use.

That particular problem is fixed now, but the simple truth is that Microsoft got into the game way ahead of everyone else.

patio11• 17 years ago

This, this, a thousand times this.

Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.

robin_reala2• 17 years ago

Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on localisation.

thingie• 17 years ago

We had a delivery from xkcd store delayed by one month because of few characters with diacritics, which the xkcd store software couldn't handle, and the package was sent back as undeliverable because of the unreadable address. And that was latin script, with just few diacritic marks (mostly just ASCII), I can't imagine what would happen with some non-alphabetic script…

And that is far too common. On the other hand, modern desktop software (either OSS and MS) is, thankfully, quite OK, nowadays.

metalkpretty• 17 years ago

I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.

scotty79• 17 years ago

Nice case study of what happens when delivering software is left solely to corporations.

chanux• 17 years ago

Like to discover how it feels to live without a choice. Maybe without even knowing what is a choice.

zppx• 17 years ago

That was exactly the situation in Brazil, 7 years ago, the dark age of the Brazilian internet, some users using Macs and Linux boxes (and also some Netscape fans out there that were using Windows) and web developers, myself included, "took back the web" with a couple of other browsers.

Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture

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