And you wouldn't say that the past year is directly contradictory to this?
For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.
Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes.
In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users.
Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing.
EDIT: Readability and style.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.
Today I think the industry is evolving to where companies like Microsoft and IBM need to be scared of the industry and its perception of how they behave, and whether and how much they contribute back to the community at large (whether by open source projects, or simply an undying and palpable desire to push the industry forward with innovation that will improve everyone's lives).
But that doesn't make parent's quote wrong.