[ Thanks to GenKabuki for this link.
]
“But what signaled Netscape’s doom and made Microsoft
shift strategies – offering its browser free and muscling its
customers and hardware partners to make it harder for Netscape to
compete – was not its struggle to compete with Netscape’s dominance
in the browser segment – minuscule compared to desktop software.“More threatening was that Netscape had started talking about –
and working with partners on – a new Web-browser centric
applications programming interface that would bypass the desktop OS
as the platform within which all application software would
run.“The idea, Netscape proposed, was a totally Web-centric
applications environment in which developers would write their
software to run under the browser without the intervention of the
OS altogether.”