IE was already dominant by 2002. Microsoft didn't ignore the Internet. They went hell bent on it during Gates era and won decisevely. It's only when they had no competition IE got stuck and then surpassed.
If talking about bundling a web browser inside their OS, sure. It was more that Microsoft missed the entire potential of the internet as a whole and how fundamentally transformational it could be. They had no presence in online services, e-commerce, search and more until they saw competitors eating their lunch, and have been lagging behind ever since.
> AOL was already dominant by the time MSN launched.
And never got off the pre-web walled garden end-to-end business model, despite connecting to the web, and died because of it. Not exactly the best example to use to argue Microsoft missed the boat on Web-era online services.
Number one browser aside, they had the number one web mail app, the number one chat app, the number one voice chat app, the most web native news service.
Yes Ballmer threw everything away and IE, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Skype and MSNBC are jokes now, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t dominant force in Bill Gates era.
> Yes Ballmer threw everything away and IE, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Skype and MSNBC are jokes now, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t dominant force in Bill Gates era.
At least we got Xbox and Xbox live… which seems to have barely lived by a life line. Confusing mess with Xbox vs windows vs media center PC.
I still think they could have been much more successful with the kinetic. Wii was loved for its ability to bowl and play tennis and etc. Nobody I know really wants to strap a sensory deprivation device onto their face. I don’t see VR working out but a highly evolved sensor bar that allows you to interact with humans physically present and online seems an easier pill to swallow. Never owned one but seems like Kinect is still fondly remembered in some applications.
All that said I wouldn't buy one today because I don’t need x amount of cameras and lidars and y microphones recording inside my house 24/7 and going to MSFT and whoever else.
> They had a presence in online services, MSN is older than even IE.
No, it isn’t. IE, Microsoft Internet Start (Microsoft’s original web portal), and MSN (originally a separate subscription-based dialup online service that later merged with the main portal) all launched simultaneously in August 1995.
IE was not a terrible browser, and Microsoft did really go hell bent on it in terms of dedicating resources to the IE development. I am not sure why you call IE a terrible browser here. (IE has to be compared to Netscape for any such assessment to make sense). IE development stopped once Microsoft had won, not before.
