> Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop.
As I remember, they moved aggressively but only after failing to anticipate or even make significant early reactions to the "world wide web", which allowed Netscape Navigator to rapidly take the majority share of what should have been made obvious by the Mosaic browser. Microsoft would take years to respond.
And when they responded it wasn't really with the aim of making better products, but with aggressive (and possibly anti competitive) sales strategies and by introducing deliberate incompatibilities and proprietary features.
I think the very consumer oriented nature of MS made them the enemy number one in mainstream nerd culture, but this behavior is nothing new or different about Microsoft. Large corporations in general I believe are ill suited to "innovate" and that can't be fixed. Not just ill-suited actually but they actually stifle it. Despite everyone claiming they want innovation, when the rubber hits the road they actually don't. It's easy to sell small incremental improvements in performance or cost or features. It's hard to sell something that will obsolete a corporation's most profitable product, or make a VP's business redundant, or kill the sales strategy that the CEO's team has spent a decade perfecting.
It's not even innovation per se, simply reacting to something new well after the writing is on the wall and nobody can deny it is a challenge for an organization. Everyone from executives down to managers and even individual workers have their own fiefdoms that they protect so even things that would be quite clearly in the best interests of the business can be difficult to achieve. Intel is a great example of this with their server group protecting Itanium and holding their territory against the PC group, which resulted in the small upstart AMD defining the 64-bit extension to x86. And then not long afterwards, their PC group defended their turf against their mobile division which resulted in them completely failing in the smartphone market which has arguably almost entirely driven the woes they face today with TSMC overtaking their manufacturing capability and ARM Ltd, Apple, Amazon etc rivaling their high performance CPU design and server products.
(Sorry that rant ended up way off topic and doesn't really address what you wrote, I don't think you're wrong, just clarifying that Microsoft was aggressive in strategy but not in technology development or adoption)
When they realised that they wouldn't be able to marginalize the web, they licensed the Spyglass browser and bundled it as Internet Explorer. That was remarkably successful, as Windows users used that instead of bothering to install Netscape, and it wasn't long before many websites wouldn't work properly with anything but IE. However, over time Microsoft apparently put IE on a back-burner for further development as they tried to herd people back into their proprietary protocols. That left an opening for a comeback of Netscape in the form of Mozilla.
As I remember, they moved aggressively but only after failing to anticipate or even make significant early reactions to the "world wide web", which allowed Netscape Navigator to rapidly take the majority share of what should have been made obvious by the Mosaic browser. Microsoft would take years to respond.
And when they responded it wasn't really with the aim of making better products, but with aggressive (and possibly anti competitive) sales strategies and by introducing deliberate incompatibilities and proprietary features.
I think the very consumer oriented nature of MS made them the enemy number one in mainstream nerd culture, but this behavior is nothing new or different about Microsoft. Large corporations in general I believe are ill suited to "innovate" and that can't be fixed. Not just ill-suited actually but they actually stifle it. Despite everyone claiming they want innovation, when the rubber hits the road they actually don't. It's easy to sell small incremental improvements in performance or cost or features. It's hard to sell something that will obsolete a corporation's most profitable product, or make a VP's business redundant, or kill the sales strategy that the CEO's team has spent a decade perfecting.
It's not even innovation per se, simply reacting to something new well after the writing is on the wall and nobody can deny it is a challenge for an organization. Everyone from executives down to managers and even individual workers have their own fiefdoms that they protect so even things that would be quite clearly in the best interests of the business can be difficult to achieve. Intel is a great example of this with their server group protecting Itanium and holding their territory against the PC group, which resulted in the small upstart AMD defining the 64-bit extension to x86. And then not long afterwards, their PC group defended their turf against their mobile division which resulted in them completely failing in the smartphone market which has arguably almost entirely driven the woes they face today with TSMC overtaking their manufacturing capability and ARM Ltd, Apple, Amazon etc rivaling their high performance CPU design and server products.
(Sorry that rant ended up way off topic and doesn't really address what you wrote, I don't think you're wrong, just clarifying that Microsoft was aggressive in strategy but not in technology development or adoption)