[wjb182]

Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top to bottom. Although it never panned out, the original vision for IE and MSN was that Microsoft would get a piece of all sales that took place on the platform, be it physical or digital. IE being the standard browser also pushed adoption of things like FrontPage, IIS, and BackOffice, and all of the proprietary vendor lock-in features they carried with them. I'm not sure to what extent Microsoft ever really feared that web browsers threatened their OS monopoly, but viewed it more as a chance to carry their dominance into a new lucrative market.

[echelon]

> Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top to bottom.

And we stopped them and the world was better for it.

Now it's time to repeat the process for Google and Apple.

Competition is fundamentally important to healthy innovation. Look at how long we've been stuck in smartphone incrementalism - no new players can even enter the market.

Now Google is trying to control the web with WEI, AMP, exclusivity deals, and other anti-competitive garbage.

Nevermind the fact that most people now do their computing on smartphones, that the smartphone stacks are becoming payment stacks, that app stores are taxes on innovation, and that these companies are removing the ability for new companies to build healthy platforms.

It won't be long before they tax going to Starbucks and justify it because phone wallets are a core part of physical commerce.

[RajT88]

> And we stopped them and the world was better for it.

Not completely. IE kept market share for a reallllly long time because of the strategic incompatibilities they put into how they implemented standards. Ensuring that they kept their market share by smaller companies only targeting IE with their web apps.

I still run into apps occasionally that only work in IE!