This one's kind of mundane to me, mainly because there's been too much coverage of it. I also don't have a problem with the integration of Internet Explorer with the operating system. Plus Pack, most browsers were free. Netscape, in fact, was one of the first to charge for something that was widely available at no cost. Now that the products are more evenly matched, Internet Explorer has caught up in popularity, naturally.
Customers always opt for the better choice.
The second, far more interesting battle, however, centers on the possibility that Microsoft may leverage its control of the desktop to sell and distribute its enterprise-level products. Microsoft certainly has tied in its Internet development tools to its Transaction Server. And Internet Explorer has a pretty close link to Internet Information Server and Microsoft's Active Server Pages strategy. Clearly, Windows 95 is tied in directly with SMS, and IE 4.0 with the Channel Definition Format. If anyone out there is worried about this, they should understand that no one would buy SQL Server and IE 4.0 for Web transactions.