What Microsoft's Decision To Retire Explorer Tells Us About How The Company Has Changed For The Better

As a user first of Mosaic and then of Netscape, I was not alone in seeing the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer back in 1995 as an attempt by a company that had completely underestimated the importance of the internet, that had seen the emergence of the Netscape phenomenon, to use the dirty trick of bundling it into the operating system which at that time dominated computing so as to dominate the market. I witnessed firsthand the downfall of Netscape while living in the United States, resisted it for a long time, and saw how the market ended up going where Microsoft wanted it to go, thus elevating Internet Explorer, a mediocre browser, to absolute monopoly: 95% market share. The story has been told in the browser wars chronicles, and the subsequent United States vs. Microsoft is still the textbook case of product bundling.