IE's job was Preventing cross-platform development
IE's purpose wasn't to achieve dominance over the browser market - it was to prevent the browser from displacing the operating system as the important user interface, by preventing compatibility and cross-platform development. Dan Farmer's SATAN network security analysis program had demonstrated that browsers were a good enough user interface for most applications, Netscape and various Unix versions (including Linux and BSD) were free or near-free, and AOL could have swamped the market by porting their application to Linux and handing out free coasters to everybody. What IE needed to do was to get a large enough chunk of the corporate browser space to prevent everybody from moving over.
And they succeeded. Microsoft's still around.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
