At the dawn of the Internet age, Microsoft used every trick it knew to dominate the World Wide Web. That strategy worked for a few years, but aggressive antitrust enforcement and equally aggressive competitors crushed the company's onetime dominance. Here's a quarter-century of history that explains just what happened.
1994: In the beginning, there was Netscape
There were other browsers before it, but Netscape Navigator was the first to capture significant market share. The company, founded by Marc Andreessen, went public in 1995 in an IPO that arguably sparked a revolution and then a bubble in Internet stocks.
Andreessen ambitiously boasted that Netscape would "reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers." Microsoft fought back aggressively, leading eventually to an antitrust case.
Netscape CEO James Barksdale testified about one meeting with Microsoft: "I had never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us."
Netscape sold to AOL in 1999, but the browser's source code became the basis of the Mozilla project.
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