In 1995, Microsoft was in trouble. Big trouble.
OS/2, despite its fans, was going nowhere. Windows 3.11 was, at best, a great GUI for running Microsoft Excel, but not a whole lot else. And then, as now, Apple owned the graphical desktop with the Mac.
If that wasn't bad enough for Bill Gates and his pals, the Internet was turning out to be a much, much bigger deal than they had ever dreamed it was going to be: Netscape was already riding its browser to becoming, albeit briefly, a billion-dollar company.
Many people today think that Microsoft led the way to the Web with Internet Explorer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you can lay your hands on a copy of the first edition of Bill Gates' 1995 book, "The Road Ahead," you'll find that Bill didn't think that the Internet wasn't going to be that important at all.
It was only after seeing Netscape rocket to the top that Microsoft's executives realized that they were missing the Internet bus.
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