I have a hard time seeing what difference it is going to make in the long run. It seems to me that the story goes like this. Microsoft got caught with its pants down when the Internet came up and took the computing world by storm. If anybody else tried to make it a cross-platform standard, they would not be taken seriously but when it's Microsoft, the world paid attention.
Developers are lazy.
Works for me. Most developers are not afraid to invest some effort now to save themselves the effort later and that is why ActiveX will most likely fail in the long run. Even with versions of the ActiveX SDK available for the three major platforms, it simply makes more sense to program with the largest installed base in mind and that base is now Java, not ActiveX or even Windows. So, fine, let Netscape adopt ActiveX and let Microsoft give it away, it really won't amount to much in the long run, because ActiveX is just too much work with too little rationale. ActiveX doomed anyway.