Sure, Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in the software business but they've screwed up many times. The late awareness of the Internet is probably their biggest stumble but they recovered nicely. Remember Bob? How about how Intuit still kicks sand in Microsoft Money's face? There are tons of alternatives to Microsoft products out there.

Microsoft has caught a lot of flak for bundling things into their operating systems. This trend is as old as computers. In the earliest days, there were no operating systems. Each programmer hand to manage things like memory allocation and communicating with devices. This was not only expensive and a royal pain, it made software much harder to develop and to maintain. The earliest operating systems represented a standard set of services that programmers could call upon in their programs. Initially, these services were limited to things like communicating with devices and memory allocation. As computers advanced, so did the operating systems. Standard features were added to facilitate networking, provide for user interfaces, system utilities (e.g. defragging and error recovery), etc. Microsoft was just continued this trend. Despite whatever service Microsoft bundles with their systems, users are free to buy and install competing products from other companies. You aren't limited to using MS products.

Microsoft caught a bunch of flak for bundling Internet Explorer into the OS. They weren't the first to do so. IBM bundled a browser into OS/2 Warp 3.0, a product that was released before Windows 95. I'm pretty sure that Apple had bundled a browser as well. The fact remains that even though IE is bundled with Windows, users are free to install Netscape if they choose. The same is true for competing products for Media Player, defragger, video editing, etc.

As for Netscape, they remind me of Micropro. Back in the late 1970s, Micropro released a word processor that quickly became the dominant product on the CP/M market - WordStar. They migrated WordStar over to MS-DOS in 1981. WordStar advanced incrementally over the next few years and then the company sat on their laurels (always a dangerous and uncomfortable thing to do). They didn't upgrade the product for about 3 years. By that time, another word processor had come on the market and established dominance - Word Perfect. By the time Micropro updated WordStar, they were playing catch-up. They never did regain their former dominance and disappeared in the early 1990s. Word Perfect then screwed up. They held about 80-90% of the market share on MS-DOS but were slow to port their product to Windows. As a result, Microsoft's Word for Windows started gaining market share. By the time Word Perfect released a Windows version, they were no longer number one. The moral to the story is that, in the computer industry, even snoozing for a short nap can be fatal. Also, just because Microsoft releases a product, there's no guarantee that people will buy it.