Yes, there seems to be some disconnect between Microsft killing off competition and said competition simply being worse. Not to say that there weren't smaller companies with good products that were pushed out by some intentional decisions on Microsoft's part, but the headline examples always rung a bit hollow for me.
People forget, because it's seen as "hip" to hate on it now, but when IE6 was released, it really was a better browser than the competition.
What killed Netscape was that version 3.0 of their server products were terrible. At the time I was working for a company that had spent millions on version 2. It was easier to jump platforms than to try to get 3 stable for us...
Dude, people don't hate IE6 because it's hip, we hate it because it has wasted hours and hours and hours of time for each and every one of us who design for the web, and the websites you use are worse as a result.
Maybe IE6 was better than the competition in 2001, but it was also terribly buggy and non-standards-compliant, encouraged developers to include Windows-only components that made it impossible for users to change browsers or even upgrade, and then wasn't upgraded for 5 years. Five years. And they did it that way not by accident or incompetence, but because they knew before anyone else that the web was a competitor, and they wanted to screw it up as much as possible.
Hate hate hate IE6 and be proud of it. Microsoft has a lot of karma to make up.
Yes, but from when IE4 came out (1997) until late 2004 when Firefox came out, IE was the undisputed best browser (yes I'm ignoring Opera as we always have). That was 7 very long years of getting people to upgrade to IE from NN4.
What? No. Borland was vastly superior to Visual Studio. Today Visual Studio is the best IDE in existence, but in the Borland days creating a GUI was much, much easier in Borland.
IE > Netscape
Visual Studio > anything by Borland
Excel > Lotus
Word > Wordperfect