you have good points. but what I belive gates was refering to at the time was what he was seeing as a threat to windows. if you ever have the chance, buy a used SGI workstation from ebay and play with the system. SGI had an affordable business workstations (pizza boxes) that shipped with irix5. the mais thing for irix 5 was that most of the in house applications (e.g. settings pannel, doc library, etc) were mozilla XUL+js applications! I kid you not. that was 1994 and the electron concept was alive and strong with mozilla 2. iriz 5.3 or 6 (i am sure i am getting the versions all wrong from memory) even had the first CSS implementation! and it was mostly to ease the transition from the motif gui framework to XUL.

this is what gates calles the figth for the web. saving windows. thats why they integrated IE so heavily on explorer. ...again, they did hit very hard in the actual internet ecosystem, but that was a side effect. and they would be silly not to try to take some advantage of that too since they were getting this for "free" while fighting for windows dominance.