Here is a little-known story about how Microsoft ran up its market share in word processors in the 1980s when Word Perfect and WordStar and other competitors dominated the market.

Nominally Microsoft "sold" Microsoft Word, that is to say, it existed on store shelves, and a big corporation could buy a thousand copies at a clip at the retail price. But Microsoft tolerated massive bootlegging of the program, in fact, its policies fostered the practice.

By the 1990s it was installed on so many computers that the program had dominant market share. Only then did the company change its policies, and began, belatedly, to actually make some small efforts to enforce its rights as copyright holder. Which it could easily do, since by then it had driven its competitors out of business, and users had little if any alternative for word processor.

When it employed the same strategy against Netscape, the only difference was, it made no secret of what it was doing.