What could have been...
I'll add a memory. Originally, Microsoft had an agreement with AOL to allow early versions of IE to be the only browser that worked through the AOL client. I remember finding some instructions on a BBS (I think I dialed in and used z-modem, but it's been a while) and hacking the AOL configuration somehow to let Netscape work.
As for what could of been, well. It's taken 20 years to get to the place that MS was deathly afraid of - applications that run on browsers instead of being tied to the Windows OS. If they had not spent so much time trying to kill all the other browsers that popped up, we could have probably been here a decade ago.
Don't get me wrong - Netscape had it's problems, both technical and managerial. If the roles had been reversed, however, I think that Netscape would have continued development after defeating IE. Instead, Netscape died, MS declared victory and killed the IE development team, leaving only one dev working on IE patches for almost five years, thereby killing all web development for a time.
Fail icon for MS literally failing humanity by slowing down development of one of the most important human inventions of all time.