Re:s/driven/killed/ (Score 1)

"They disparaged GUIs and the whole idea of user-friendly computing until the Mac proved them wrong."

MS was the original champion of the Mac. Word and Excel were developed for the Mac.

"Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet"

Windows had TCP/IP and a dialer built in years before Mac OS.

"so they killed the competition by illegally leveraging their monopoly on Windows desktops"

MS did many things much worse in business but being sued over including a browser was stupid.

I ran a small ISP. I was a Netscape promoter until 4.0 which still didn't have a working dialer. I had bought tens of thousands of dollars in Netscape licenses but they still treated me like an annoyance because I wasn't a fortune 500 company. MS was very friendly and responsive. I could email their developers directly and get a patched utility in a week. I was friends with all the other ISP owners in the state and knew many other small ISP's owners across the country from conventions and corporate buyout meetings. They all told the same story, "I wanted to give Netscape to customers, but 4.0 is a mess."

"With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open."

Blaming MS for IE not being developed quick enough is like blaming Apple for not coming out with the iPhone in 2001.

" It has never been an innovation leader."

No large company innovates. Apple copies everything too. iPod, iPhone, all-in-one form factor, mac mini, ultra-thin laptop: It was all done by other companies years before.