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By Jim Forbes
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Online Services Mean Business
Microsoft and Netscape, among others, have a new weapon in the browser war: plug-ins. These are small-memory-footprint programs that perform some functions previously found only in full-fledged applications.
Few users will buy a spreadsheet plug-in rather than a product like Excel, but in the long run these applets could affect the feature set and sales of standalone apps. Plug-ins "help make the Internet more mainstream," said Chris LeTocq, an analyst with Dataquest.
Netscape offered plug-ins this spring with the $49.95 Power Pack, which has 15 applets. They range from Formula One, a spreadsheet product that supports Excel's native format, to ASAP WebShow, a utility from Software Publishing Corp. that allows users to create and send presentation graphics.
That was just the start. At press time, 30-plus plug-ins worked with Navigator, and the company expects to pass 100 by year's end: scaled-down word processors, presentation graphics, and programs that ease the use of streaming video and audio or view 3-D Web pages. Developers are even working on database programs.
Microsoft is taking a different tack-not surprising, given that it derives more than half its revenue from the sale of applications. While the company is unlikely to offer competing soft-ware, it will use language products such as Visual Basic and a pending version of Java to en-hance its own browser and better customize its applications for the Net.
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