So Microsoft is going to ship Windows 98 with an Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. There's an interesting phenomenon in the computing industry that is frustrating to people in the short term, but beneficial to all in the long run. Any time you have two high-profile competing products, the advances in the technology of those products occur at a rapid pace. A good example is the past competition between WordStar and WordPerfect, and later between WordPerfect and Microsoft Word. People got tired of having to upgrade their word processor every six months or so just to keep up, but we have much better word processors today because that competition happened.
Competition spurs advancements.
Monopolies stifle advancement. What better way to sell computers than to sell ones that could read those same punched cards that had been around since the end of eighteenth century . During the Seventies and Eighties, some companies made hardware that worked like IBM computers, but IBM had firm control of the large-scale software operating system market. In some ways, backward compatibility is a marvelous thing. IBM did not achieve their dominance in the business computing market over night.