Back to the point of the article, MSIE's market share dominance... :-)
IMO, IE was the biggest blunder that I've ever seen MS commit. I really doubt they will do it again. Let's analyze: They bought the market out from under Netscape. Why? To prevent an upstart from becoming a big player in the computer business? There must be a better reason.
I figured that, after running Netscape down, they would start charging bucks for IE. But they haven't. I contend that, inside MS, IE is seen as a big loadstone around their neck. It is constantly under attack from hackers. They continually patch it for free. Everything related to IE is available for free download. The bandwidth for these downloads is very expensive. In short, IE is a very expensive program to maintain. But where is the return on investment?
They have 96% market share today, but if they asked everyone to send in $50 tomorrow for IE, their market share would probably be less than 25% by the end of next week: There is too much free competition.
Back in the MS's growing years, their approach was different. Apple was the company that wanted profit from every aspect of their computers: They wanted profit from the hardware and the OS, and they wanted to create most the software.
But MS's approach was different. Compared with Apple, MS's was the OS with which you could get "under the hood". MS had the better tools/compilers for building applications. MS became what it is today, in large part, because its OS supported more 3rd party apps than anyone else.
Lately, though, they seem to be taking more of the Apple approach: They want the entire "pie". But, if they have to "buy" business to make this happen, then what's the point? As I recall, the dot-com failures were caused by a lack of money-making activity (although initially fueled by grandiose plans for a website or something). It makes me wonder... Did Balmer hire any of those dot-com MBA's?
I've seen "The Meo" (tm) that Bill sent around that made IE a real product. IE has accomplished exactly what they wantd it to.
There were two big problems Gates saw. First the internet was a standard being used by millions of people that MS hadn't created. More importantly MS had no share in this at all. People should keep this in mind when they complain that IE doesn't follow W3C standards, duh. MS didn't take over this market to be told what the standards are, as evidenced by the number of web developers here that have confessed to coding to IE rather than W3C, IE is the real web interpretting standard. The second thing to keep in mind is that even in the pre-java days browsers were already showing the ability ot be desktop replacements. With form inputs, CGI and Perl the ability was there (though under utilized) to have web apps thatdid everything. That made Netscape a threat to the Windows market.
The problems come in because they had to integrate with the desktop to avoid the Netscape suit (which IMHO was bogus, I've never agreed that monopolies should be banned from normal business practices like loss leaders; the fact that one company that gave the browser away was suing another company trying to force them to charge for the browser shows how idiotic this stuff can get). If they hadn't had to integrate IE to the desktop things would be easier for them, but i think the stability/ security issues they inherrited because of that are considered a small price to pay for accomplishing the goals.
At this juncture they CAN'T ever charge for IE. Not only is integrated deep into the OS it's integrated into most of their software. One of the cool things about browsers is their ability to handle elasticity (moving stuff around in the window while the user resizes it), subsequently browser controls are a crutch that both MS and many OEMs use. Truly amazing amounts of software actually display in a browser window, you'll only know this if you watch the install VERY closely (and then only if you have an old IE on your system), you might be able to see them installing IE.
MS is a lot like Rome. If you check the documentation of Rome's major expansion you see something very interesting. According to Rome all of her expansion was defensive, Rome was (or believed it was) constantly under threat of being destroyed by oustide forces. MS has the same attitude, somewhere in the bowels of Redmond is papers describing how every application out there can be used to destroy MS, subsequently they must crush these clear threats. That's why they want the whole pie, because every piece they don't have could be the key to their destruction.