Keep in mind that the major growth of the internet occurred after the browser war was over. Fully half of the people using the internet in the US today started to do so after IE had become the dominant browser. Personally I don't think it's too far fetched to expect that MS should have a right to put their own browser on their own OS (as with Apple, Palm, etc.) Especially so given that once one has A browser it is trivial to switch to another.
Again, I think bundling is a side note, people concentrate on it because of quirks of the law which made it a cornerstone of the anti-trust case against MS. The real reason MS won the browser war was because they pushed when Netscape was most vulnerable. The simple fact is that the change in marketshare from NS to IE during the browser war is too great to be accounted for entirely by anything that doesn't include lots and lots of active NS users consciously switching to IE. That doesn't fit the narrative of the unjustly wronged spunky little david (coughAOLcough) going up against the evil goliath, but that's the way it happened.
MS has plenty to answer for but the extended period of IE browser dominance is as much due to Netscape/AOL's massive mistakes as it is to Microsoft's cunning.
Again, I think bundling is a side note, people concentrate on it because of quirks of the law which made it a cornerstone of the anti-trust case against MS. The real reason MS won the browser war was because they pushed when Netscape was most vulnerable. The simple fact is that the change in marketshare from NS to IE during the browser war is too great to be accounted for entirely by anything that doesn't include lots and lots of active NS users consciously switching to IE. That doesn't fit the narrative of the unjustly wronged spunky little david (coughAOLcough) going up against the evil goliath, but that's the way it happened.
MS has plenty to answer for but the extended period of IE browser dominance is as much due to Netscape/AOL's massive mistakes as it is to Microsoft's cunning.