I can't agree with this. MFC was a thin C++ encapsulation of the Windows API. It was a reasonably successful technology but was unloved largely because it was so thin - it didn't try to fix the ugly mess beneath and so left developers wrestling a large smelly octopus. .Net was more of a clean room attempt to provide developers with a clean, sane, consistent API built on a new virtual machine based architecture complete with a shiny new language (C#, basically Java++).
"MFC was introduced in 1992 with Microsoft's C/C++ 7.0 compiler for use with 16-bit versions of Windows as an extremely thin object-oriented C++ wrapper for the Windows API."
Thinness is probably in the eye of the beholder, but as one of the many MFC victims back in the day, I found using MFC to be endlessly frustrating because it added a layer of complexity and pain to Win32 programming without giving me anything I really wanted back in compensation - you still needed to work directly with arcane Win32 mechanisms to do simple things, like, change the background color of a window for example. Admittedly there was some (less thin) Document/View model stuff thrown in there, but the impression I got was that this was an afterthought bolted on the side.
In contrast, Qt and wxWidgets for example are toolkits that are designed to make a programmer's life easier by providing a genuinely convenient abstraction of a Windowed GUI.
What they did was bundle internet connectivity in with the every windows PC. Sounds ridiculous even mentioning it, right?
Back then you couldn't connect to the internet without installing third party tools, usually from an ISP on a disc. You had to install a browser, you couldn't embed hyperlinks in documents, there was no built-in way to get an email client..etcetcetc.
The original memo was not about building developer tools for the internet, but on taking a stand-alone operating system and shipping it with networking and hyperlinks and forming partnerships with ISPs and on and on.
It was much simpler for users to put in the AOL disk and stay inside their walled garden - both conceptually and technically easier for laypeople.
Just because Microsoft went on to dominate the desktop market and win the browser war doesn't mean it was inevitable.
This ridiculous comparison shows just how clueless you are about the .NET platform and Windows development.
And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation.
They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies.
None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.
Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative".
Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple).
The new CEO might change this, I don't know.
But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft.
For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.