The last time Apple was beaten by Microsoft (although it had partnerships originally) as it considered IBM its major threat. This time around I think Apple will be beaten by Google as it is having most of its focus on Microsoft.
Much more likely is that Apple will once again be beaten by Microsoft because it considers Google its major threat. Apple has a blind spot for the idea that a company without any quality technology can crush it. Accordingly today's Apple considers Google its major competition. The thing that can do in both Apple and Google is that Microsoft still owns the Desktop and can extend its monopoly onto other platforms.
Bing wouldn't have any traction without the ability to control IE and install itself by default. Lucky for Google, manufacturers can change it; if it hadn't been for the Clinton Justice anti-trust suit they would still be prohibited from changing it and Microsoft would have already killed Google.
IE has had as its main mission for a decade the prevention of HTML/DHTML/AJAX applications that run with Web standards just as well as Desktop apps and resistance to quality standard versions of HTML5 will be led by a raft of subtle Microsoft incompatibilities. That will extend the Win32 API monopoly.
If Google and Apple can't understand that, all the tech and design in the world won't save them.
I don't think that's accurate since IE introduced XMLHttpRequest, vital to AJAX.
2) Sure XMLHttpRequest is nice. IE implements good things like that to maintain market share but then ensures that it is never up to standards in order to cripple the possibility of a capable open standard platform emerging. Witness the slow response times, lack of support for Canvas, PNG (still), broken box models (still, through at least IE7), broken message model, and more. That would all be easy to fix if MS wanted to. They make more money without a widespread good, fast standards-based browser in the market.
by that time they weren't really trying to tie the web to Windows anymore, they thought the web was obsolete and were trying to replace it entirely.