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 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.