It was a particularly shortsighted gambit, too, since native applications still beat the pants off of any JS web-based implementation for all but the most trivial of applications. Even very popular web apps these days are less efficient than the (native) applications and servers that back them, where the majority of real work by the computer is done, and arguably are less efficient and more clunky (to both use and maintain) than corresponding native front-ends would be. Until/unless browsers actually have capabilities that rival VMs in some sense and are used as such, it will remain that way.
It wasn't short sighted. It very effectively hobbled a competing ecosystem. They did hold the web back by 6 or 7 years and if they hadn't done their best to kill it in its crib then web apps would be 6 or 7 years better than they are now. (Look at the progress since Mozilla broke their stranglehold, it led directly to the iPhone amongst other things)
Its very hard for people to contemplate hypotheticals though (Taleb discusses this in Fooled by Randomness) so they got way with it.
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It was a particularly shortsighted gambit, too, since native applications still beat the pants off of any JS web-based implementation for all but the most trivial of applications. Even very popular web apps these days are less efficient than the (native) applications and servers that back them, where the majority of real work by the computer is done, and arguably are less efficient and more clunky (to both use and maintain) than corresponding native front-ends would be. Until/unless browsers actually have capabilities that rival VMs in some sense and are used as such, it will remain that way.
It wasn't short sighted. It very effectively hobbled a competing ecosystem. They did hold the web back by 6 or 7 years and if they hadn't done their best to kill it in its crib then web apps would be 6 or 7 years better than they are now. (Look at the progress since Mozilla broke their stranglehold, it led directly to the iPhone amongst other things)
Its very hard for people to contemplate hypotheticals though (Taleb discusses this in Fooled by Randomness) so they got way with it.