I just reread your comment, and I stand by my response.

Microsoft didn't replace some standard with a subtly different standard when they did ActiveX and VBScript... what was the standard you claim existed that they were ring subtly different from? JavaScript? Java? (Again: not a standard.)

You claim Microsoft ignored standards, but Microsoft actually cared a lot about being on top of standards and were involved in the standards process; if anything their fault was shipping stuff too early (which would be something you could pick on, but didn't; it would even be a powerful and apropros argument, as that's what Google is doing today): they cared about CSS when no one else did, and later they cared about XSL/T when no one else did.

You also claim that Microsoft stopped working on IE6 when they obtained dominance: I directly touch on that in my expanded comments, pointing out that it makes more sense that Microsoft stopped working on IE when they ran into legal opposition and the project became demoralizing and dangerous. Microsoft does not have a history of simply not releasing updates to products they have dominated: their updates are at times problematic to others and sometimes even self-defeating, but something really weird happened with IE6--where there was only a single service pack release during a nearly five year hiatus from any form of update--that simply isn't well-explained by their dominance.

The only situation I can come up with similar to your arguments is DHTML Behaviors, which is amazingly similar in goal to that of this new Web Components stuff ;P. I will claim this is exactly the kind of thing chadwickthebold is talking about when he said "MS pushed for adoption of proto-standards before there was any sort of agreement on how they should actually be interpreted/implemented". Here is the proto-spec:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-becss-19990804

Microsoft submitted DHTML Behaviors to the W3C in 1998, spent a bunch of time with them talking about how it would work, and in the end shipped it in 1999 as part of IE5. Maybe the timeline is tighter than Web Components today with Google, but it seems like the same story. (Note that I haven't researched this to the same extent as my earlier comments, but I am definitly basing this off of historical sources; if you disagree with this comparison, I would be interested in hearing some similarly-historically-based arguments for how the timeline played out and why I this fundamentally different than Google today.)

Finally, now in this comment you talk about "broke the standards": I would appreciate some citations and examples; the primary things I know that people like to argue about are issues with CSS and XSL/T that are entirely explained by "pushing proto-standard"... the IE box model being the prototypical example.

So, each one of your comments are incorrect. It thereby doesn't matter what your conclusion is; in my earlier comments I'm arguing against people comparing Microsoft to Netscape, but in this thread I am just pointing out your statements about Microsoft are unsubstantiated. It doesn't matter what your opinion of Netscape is, and if you reread the comment I made on this thread, my response to you, you will see that I don't bring that idea up at all... you decided to transplant the conclusion from my citations to here, I am guessing because that is easier than addressing any of my actual complaints about your facts one-by-one? Again: none of these facts you are stating fit the history, and if you are going to keep repeating them I'd like some primary source material for them (mailing list posts or comments by developers from back when Microsoft was actually dominant or before the did, not after they lost and abandoned the web entirely).