You lost me. MS put out a product for free that was competing with other products for free. Are you really saying that is the situation here?

Netscape initially charged for the browser.

"Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

Good example. MS successfully killed off Netscape (the company) within a few years by bundling an inferior browser. It also prevented them from entering desktop OS, which was perceived as a threat back in the day.

Edit: FYI, Mosaic was the one I had in mind, which was free.

In it's day, IE was not an inferior browser. Quiet the opposite, actually.

IE3 was horrendous. The tide only turned with the release of IE4.

IE4, I believe, was the first version included in the OS or came in automatically with updates. I think IE3 came in one of those internet startup kits.

"In it is day, IE was not an inferior browser. [Making little or no noise] the opposite, actually."

Putting aside the snarky remark about IE's apparent target audience, there are any number of contemporary sources which give examples of how your intended statement is factually incorrect.

For example: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/v-e.pdf

Personally, I started out as a Netscape for Windows user thinking Microsoft had no chance of catching up to a competitor as nimble as Netscape. IE 1.0 was awful (basically a rebrand of an outdated Spyglass Mosaic), IE2 was a little better but still grossly inadequate, IE3 was just fine, but there was no reason to switch, and IE4 was legitimately better (in my opinion) than Netscape was at the time. (Helped by the fact that Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess.)

There is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree, but my conversion circa IE4 was not an outlying datapoint.

I started out as a Netscape for Mac user. I stayed that way until there was a viable alternative, and that alternative was never IE, no matter how much Steve Jobs stood on stage and said he loved it.

That may be true for the Mac, but the vast majority of users were on Windows. And on Windows, IE would have won the browser wars on its own merits without Microsoft's dirty tricks. As the GP said - IE3 was better than Netscape 3 and IE4 was streets ahead. Netscape 4 was the worst release of a major browser that I've seen.

Really? I thoguh IE5 was a really solid browser on the mac.

IE on mac was created by a different team, and was very different form IE on Windows. It was a popular browser.

I have still to find anyone who actually used any of the IEs that MS released for Unix.

I know that it was supposed to cost money but I have never met anyone, outside of corporations, that actually paid for Navigator. My ISP included it in their software packet, my school had it readily available.

I think they were doing "free for noncommercial uses" license because most of the people I knew then I wouldn't consider a software pirate.

I still have my Netscape Navigator 3 box, manual and floppies that I bought from my local computer shop back in 1996.

Not to mention, MS made a (then) superior product. I agree, the analogy doesn't work.

No, I think he's saying that MS put out a browser bundled with every windows computer sold, so that was what dominated. Now google can do something similar in leveraging its existing userbase (everyone with a google account) to drive adoption of gdrive (ala google+). You won't have to sign up for something new... it'll already be waiting for you.