I am not saying that wasn't the intent. What I am saying is the only real guilty one in the Netscape fail was Netscape.
The situation was still there when Firefox and Chrome came to play (and I suspect also the intent) and it didn't prevent IE to step aside.
The same goes to Flash... it is still there because there still are stuff you can't do in HTML 5 (streaming live video for instance) and without a real alternative we would have to live with it (hopefully that will change soon)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...
Had they succeeded with the IE strategy, ActiveX controls would have the same endemic status as Flash does now, but unimplementable on any browser other than IE.