Yes, but that doesn't alter the fact that Bill Gates saw the web as an existential risk for Microsoft, and did everything in his power to ensure that the web ev

Yes, but that doesn't alter the fact that Bill Gates saw the web as an existential risk for Microsoft, and did everything in his power to ensure that the web evolved in a way that would benefit Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. I find the second part of Nadella's quote to be especially ironic: Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft tried to do. They tried to force their own proprietary standards on the web. It was only after they were slapped down by the Justice Department that they stopped engaging in anti-competitive behavior and created the space for alternative web browsers to grow. Even then, it was almost too late. How many decades did we wait for IE6 to finally die so that we could write web sites that would even pretend to conform to modern web standards?