Nadella's talking about how the web "grew up" on Windows; it's just rhetoric about how the dominant (client-side) portion of the web was facilitated through Windows.
I'm old enough to have lived through ie6. They did everything they could to hold the web back a generation because they saw the future and it was web services and the open web doesn't exclusively run on windows.
They did not however, prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS.
I believe that was Nadella's main point, which I don't disagree with.
While they did attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish, the platform was fundamentally not locked down which still allowed the web to take over.
I don't know about netscape, but I currently use a browser other than Safari as my default browser. Unless you mean the underlying framework is WebKit?
Apple gets complete control over what a webpage can do, and chooses the features it supports to ensure the web cannot compete with the app store
They absolutely tried to, and were only stopped because the Justice Department told them that bundling IE with Windows was an illegal use of monopoly power. It's interesting that Nadella gives Microsoft credit for that and not Attorney General Janet Reno, under whose authority the Justice Department pursued the anti-trust case against Microsoft that led to browser bundling being declared anticompetitive.
The funny thing about that phrase is that it was invented to describe Active Directory's relationship with LDAP and Kerberos. Active Directory is definitely one of Windows's killer applications, and rather than attempting to kill it, Microsoft instead makes a killing off of it.
"In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer; like the object element, it can load or fetch content asynchronously. In 1998, the Microsoft Outlook Web Access team developed the concept behind the XMLHttpRequest scripting object.[4] It appeared as XMLHTTP in the second version of the MSXML library,[4][5] which shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in March 1999.[6]"
This was Microsoft's single biggest contribution to the early web. Everyone likes to hate on IE but actually it did include a lot of innovation.
IE had many issues supporting other crucial (and standard) technologies like CSS, images + alpha blending, basic ease of use features (tabs, accessibility, extensions), security (a good chunk of the ciphersuite was missing), etc.
Sure, MS was bad. Doesn’t change the fact that most people first experienced the internet through Windows. And it was that audience that brought business and more money.
Having been in the community pretty deeply in those days, I can assure you that Apple didn’t gain any sizeable market share until Web 2.0. The prototype.js + Rails developers definitely preferred OS X for their tool suite. The growth of backend developers, in general, led to Apple’s growth; via developer’s needing terminal access and easy installation/management of backend tools with ease of use.
If you're talking pre-Windows 95, certainly Mac was more popular than after it's release. But the OS also had a much more sizeable marketshare[1] and the inverse was true (Windows was devoid of software and tools). At the same time, however, the web was also much smaller and certainly still in it's nascent infancy.