They didn’t get it then, and they still don’t get it, but they directly reference their competitors that did. AOL did it better then, and better than anybody no

They didn’t get it then, and they still don’t get it, but they directly reference their competitors that did. AOL did it better then, and better than anybody now. Seriously; I’m not kidding. AOL on a dial-up delivered better service than Office365 or even GSuite on broadband. The key is mobile code. AOL pushed monkey patches with almost zero service interruption, and it was lean, no massive dependency tree that had to be reloaded in full every time the user hit the service. And still nobody can figure this out even on Android/iOS where the app runs natively. Today a new version means the app reinstalls from scratch. Web cache is basically unused anymore. So the browser was objectively awful, but platforms like AOL could not keep up with the demand growth for dial-up. They also had some issues with scale, which the browser did not, because all it did was read static files. So everybody got on $5.99 EarthLink instead of $29.99 AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy. The other part of it was the 1994(?) CDA, which was effective only at killing AOL with law suits, and completely impotent against thousands of random web hosts. So now the browser is dominant no matter how awful because nobody can develop software for the internet when they’re going to get fined because somebody uses it for adult material. Microsoft had some attempts at internet-native applications like ActiveX and their own Java, but then the decision was made to force everything internet into the browser to compete against Netscape, and focus the server on http components on IIS to compete against Apache. I think Microsoft could have gotten to “Stage 3: Windows on the internet” if they just ignored the browser and focused on their client/server application developers. As it was, they wasted two decades on the browser and gave the “apps” market to iOS/android. But, okay, step back and ask what they were really after. It was the advertising business on MSN.com, which was the default home page on IE, and 95% of users left it like that, while yahoo was the default for Netscape. As MSN was losing out to google, Microsoft’s ad business execs tried to salvage their business unit by purchasing resale ad spots on TheFaceBook.com in a $240M deal. This was also the time when browsers would regularly fail and kill everything you were doing, and so the final nail in Microsoft’s internet portal/banner ad ambitions was the release of google chrome, which simply isolated failures by running each tab in a new process. Put in that perspective, it seems they could have just provided a service to desktop app developers to use their ad network, like iAds. DoubleClick had some things like this, but it was a pain, and you really had to jump through hoops to get your app approved for native banner spots versus web site banners. Seems like Microsoft developers were really screaming for solutions here that they could have provided. App Store too. So, I do t think they lost the internet browser wars. I think they just abandoned their base to try and copy Netscape and yahoo.