[AnthonyMouse]

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system.

You're ignoring the actual EEE part.

Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser.

> Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services.

> Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode.

The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead.

Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else?

> The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Java was never a Windows replacement.

It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired.

> Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows.

But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it.

> Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

Outlook.com has 400 million users.

> And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach.

Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose.

And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.

[mrtranscendence]

> You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers

This is not a serious take. Safari on iOS is a very capable browser and crazy things have been done with it. Where it does make it difficult to replace a dedicated app, this can be ascribed to security more easily than "Apple wants one of its major iOS features to be bad".

> Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems

This is not a serious take. I'd love to see proof of this. There are lots of reasons Office became dominant, some of them even anticompetitive; "MS made competitors crash" is probably not one of them.

> It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems

This is not a serious take. Java was never intended to make it easy for users to switch operating systems. Sun did not make "supplant Windows!" one of its KPIs, and the continued dominance of Windows is neither here nor there when evaluating whether Java was successful. Java's pitch was to make writing platform-independent code easier, but at best that's tangentially related to having users switch OS's.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

So?

> And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange.

You're replying to a comment about people who run their own web server, so talking about Exchange lock-in is neither here nor there.

[stickfigure]

> lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls

Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

> The history of Office goes like this.

I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

> Java

Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.

You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach

Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.

> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?

> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.

> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.

> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.

The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.

[mixmastamyk]

How odd… seem to have all the facts at your disposal, yet use them to support the argument of the person you are adamant that you disagree with. Not a combo I've seen.

MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.

That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.