At the time IE was horrific and basically didn’t exist. Microsoft reallocated the entire focus of the company R&D towards development of the next version of IE - a colossal investment of resources that outstripped all of Netscape’s revenues for all of its history just on developing a free browser to put it out of business. So, yes, sure. It was incredibly better. But it was anticompetitive to develop it in that way. With the same resources, could Netscape have done it? Would Microsoft have done it if there was any commercial considerations?
Netscape made a product that ran on over 20 operating systems and promised a future where the operating system was a detail for how to launch a web browser. Microsoft saw this as an existential threat and crushed Netscape under a mount of money that was spent to ensure the only meaningful browser was a feature of their operating system.
After their Pyrrhic victory, IE decayed with very little investment. As you would expect in something that was developed only to destroy.
So it’s “anticompetitive” to use your resources to make a better product to compete in a new market? Was it anticompetitive for Google to give Android away to crush all of the competitors beside Apple? Was it anticompetitive for Netflix to use its profits from its dvd by mail business to create a streaming service? Apple to create iPods and then iPhones? Amazon to start AWS?
Netscape did run on a lot of platforms - and it sucked on all of them.
No, and there were thousands upon thousands of pages filed on both sides arguing both sides with hundreds of pages of written opinions explaining why this behavior is different than normal competition. A lot of it was Microsoft leaderships very specific motive, which was not about creating more competition but in specifically eliminating all competition. It’s not illegal to compete in a market or create new markets. It’s illegal to use market dominance in one market to destroy all competition in another.
How exactly do you think companies that survive and don’t suffer from the “innovative dilemma” manage to survive if they don’t use their dominance in one market to get into other markets?
What Microsoft did was much more nuanced than spend money to get into other markets - it involve pressuring OEMs not to work with competitors among other things. BTW, this is the same thing that Google has been fined for repeatedly.