Not quite. When this "Internet thing" started taking off, Bill dismissed it as a sideshow for geeks and academic institutions. He staked his money in online services such as AOL, thus creating his MSN as competition.
After everyone else had jumped on board the Internet bandwagon, Bill said "oh crap, I'm late," bought a browser from someone, didn't gain marketshare, gave it away for free and got a bit more, then decided to include it in the next version of Windows as a way to get it on everyone's desktop (and restricted OEM's from even putting a link to Netscape).
Bill was quite late to the game since he had no vision. But he did very well at leveraging his OS power to make up for that lack of vision.
That statement is simply not true. I see you are a hardcore MS hater (the kind that is willing to make up stories). Whatever turns you on. Fight the good fight Comrade (just like the democrats objecting to the Ohio vote) but if you ever invest money or your career in something I would suggest you work closer to reality.
Actually Bill's exact line (I know people who were at the meeting) was "why is there a standard out there being used by 4 million people that we don't own". At that point they were already putting the base (purchased) version of IE in Win95 (which was about to leave beta) but it was no big deal, just another utility for a market they'd heard about. After the meeting came the most frightening thing MS has ever done, the making of the new IE team. They decided who needed to be in the IE team, figured out where to put them, sent one group of people to empty that building and another group to collect the people; it was almost like a layoff, they came into people's office with boxes and said "you're on the new IE team, get going" anybody that took more than a minute to respond had their computer unplugged for them (no "hang on while I save these changes"). The big slow moving behemoth of Microsoft changed directions in an afternoon, something no one even thought was possible. Everybody thought that Netscape would have 2 or 3 years after MS entered the browser arena before they'd have serious competition, the next version (the first real version with actual features and stuff) of IE was out by the end of the year.
I was at a company that worked very closely with MS during that time, it was a very interesting view into what really makes MS a powerful company, raw will and absolute dedication to winning a market space is what that was all about. I was shocked when they officially ended new development in IE, that was a very non-MS move, guess even MS can get cocky when they have 90% of a market.