I think a lot of people attribute a lot of Microsofts success to malice. In reality they have invested heavily in improving development methods, and it shows. One only have to read &quot;I.M Wrights Hard Code&quot;, to understand exactly how many resources they allocate to improving the development cycle. And mind you this knowledge was distilled into text more than 10 years ago, but was part of the company for far longer.<p>Re. Netscape, IE on Windows surely helped, but Netscape did the no. 1 mistake and tried to rewrite everything from scratch - I can not think of any working product where it is better to throw everything out and redo everything &quot;the right way&quot;, rather than iteratively improving the code. It&#x27;s knowingly throwing out all business knowledge improvement and bugfixing you have ever done. It killed them, and would have even if IE was never bundled with Windows. In contrast, Windows 10 and Office 2016 contains code that can be traced more than 25 years back, and as evident with Vista development, MS is not afraid to accept when something has gone horribly wrong and throw it out and try again. Note that is not the same as rewriting, it is accepting that you spend a lot of resources making a prototype that ultimately showed no promise.<p>Not that MS does not do terrible things as a business. They do, exactly as any other business with that size. They have to or they will cease to exist in a few years.