As I remember, they moved aggressively but only after failing to anticipate or even make significant early reactions to the "world wide web", which allowed Netscape Navigator to rapidly take the majority share of what should have been made obvious by the Mosaic browser. Microsoft would take years to respond.
And when they responded it wasn't really with the aim of making better products, but with aggressive (and possibly anti competitive) sales strategies and by introducing deliberate incompatibilities and proprietary features.
I think the very consumer oriented nature of MS made them the enemy number one in mainstream nerd culture, but this behavior is nothing new or different about Microsoft. Large corporations in general I believe are ill suited to "innovate" and that can't be fixed. Not just ill-suited actually but they actually stifle it. Despite everyone claiming they want innovation, when the rubber hits the road they actually don't. It's easy to sell small incremental improvements in performance or cost or features. It's hard to sell something that will obsolete a corporation's most profitable product, or make a VP's business redundant, or kill the sales strategy that the CEO's team has spent a decade perfecting.
It's not even innovation per se, simply reacting to something new well after the writing is on the wall and nobody can deny it is a challenge for an organization. Everyone from executives down to managers and even individual workers have their own fiefdoms that they protect so even things that would be quite clearly in the best interests of the business can be difficult to achieve. Intel is a great example of this with their server group protecting Itanium and holding their territory against the PC group, which resulted in the small upstart AMD defining the 64-bit extension to x86. And then not long afterwards, their PC group defended their turf against their mobile division which resulted in them completely failing in the smartphone market which has arguably almost entirely driven the woes they face today with TSMC overtaking their manufacturing capability and ARM Ltd, Apple, Amazon etc rivaling their high performance CPU design and server products.
(Sorry that rant ended up way off topic and doesn't really address what you wrote, I don't think you're wrong, just clarifying that Microsoft was aggressive in strategy but not in technology development or adoption)
Outside of e-mail, the non-browser Internet applications were on their way out by the mid-90s. Mosaic put the first nail in their coffin and then Navigator hammered in a few more.
Graphical web browsing was just a richer experience than what Gopher offered. Netscape's support for Gopher, and like FTP, just made it a web-like experience. WAIS was essentially dead by the mid-90s.
Navigator obviated the need for myriad applications to access a bunch of different servers. It didn't help that as graphical browsers were gaining traction UMN decided to charge license fees for their gopher implementation while several early web servers were FOSS or at least freely licensed.
In 1995 if you wanted to start some Internet service there was no reason to do so on Gopher, WAIS, or some bespoke protocol. The web covered those services' capabilities and added a lot more, especially with HTTP 1.1. So I'd content the browser as a universal client for Internet services was pretty evident soon after Mosaic's release and a foregone conclusion with the release of Navigator.
In 1990 IRC had average of 12 users :) (but other chat programs were used before IRC) . True FTP, other chats, MUDs, email, etc. were widely used/available.
Note that the web is older than Gopherspace with the first gopher site appearing in mid-1991.
While looking up that last fact, I see that there was heavy interest in gopher by colleges and universities. Maybe our experiences differ because you were in college then?
Well, except games.
Once they killed Netscape, they literally disbanded the IE team. They also did anti-competitive shit like buy and slow-roll Hotmail to protect the golden goose. (enterprise EAs of windows and office + oem licensing.)
They are doing the same thing today with identity and security for enterprises.
Chrome is Google’s attempt at a first party solution stack. It’s weird though as chrome is owned by different teams in Google than other user facing products.
Tied to Windows, mind you.
Unless you count reframed Chromium as "other browser", the equivalent of using Microsoft's IE-based WebBrowser component back in the day.
I really don't see much of a difference.
Not that that was a bad thing though. As mentioned it is a really bad idea to auto download code off some random website and execute it. Naive we all were back then...
Microsoft isn’t run by dumb people.
I find that dubious. Do you have any sources for that?
First link on a google search confirms all this
https://www.quora.com/What-strategic-thinking-persuaded-Micr...
Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop. This is what lead to many of Microsoft's regulatory problems because doing so integrated Internet Explorer components deeply into the operating system, which was seen as anticompetitive bundling. That issue aside, it also lead to windows long running internet security issues because it meant core operating system services were directly exposed to external networks, with minimal security protections.