This is a very weird take. In 1998, MSFT announced a 28% increase in revenue with EPS increasing by 35% and ~4B in revenue. MSFT was making incredible revenue and profits for that time and were 100% engaged in practices to maintain their monopoly and extend it to unrelated areas (e.g. internet browsers).
For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did:
1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition.
2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones.
3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do.
4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.
Citation needed. https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html is a contemporaneous article that suggests the browsers were pretty equal in terms of stability and speed. The monopoly position Microsoft exploited in their OS to push IE and then business deals and mind share to solidify it by extending web standards in MS-only ways (eg activex) seems to really be the difference.
For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did:
1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition.
2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones.
3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do.
4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.