Toshiba HD-DVD firmware archive

TIL! http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf...

And the market for discs isn't what it used to be. The long tail seems nonexistent now, it's a shame old remasters aren't coming through it any more. The last one I bought was the Star Trek TNG remaster, which was on blu-ray (and looked fantastic)

But it was clearly not central to Microsoft's strategy for a long time. It's not like this is a whacky theory; their plain lack of focus on the Internet is matched by their own corporate statements about how they weren't focusing on it particularly. They got there, but they were slow to the party. They had to be forced. They had to go through some phases of attempting to embrace and extend the entire Internet, which they mostly failed at but did have a pretty good run at with Internet Explorer (though they still lost that one eventually).

Their core strategy was to focus on Windows and Office, but at the time they focused on the network as a threat to those things. They perceived the web as a threat because you don't need an OS if you just have a browser, and for as much as we today do on the web, including Office, they were afraid we'd do even more, like, do literally everything in a browser, and that the future was Chromebooks; specifically, machines with no Windows and no Office. Existential threat to a two-legged Microsoft. Prior to the internet being able to sensibly run an office suite they were also afraid that we'd all switch to some inferior product that was based on what the web could run, and they wouldn't be able to charge anywhere near as much. They saw the internet as an existential threat for a long time, not an opportunity.

So while they knew they couldn't kill the internet as a whole, and they put down some small side-bets that even if they paid off could never have sustained a company the size of Microsoft, they generally were attacking the internet and trying to embrace & extend it. Now they don't do that anymore and they generally understand it as an opportunity as well. But there was a long run where Microsoft saw it as a threat overall, even if they invested here or there. This seems to have come from Steve Ballmer, but that approaches the limits of my knowledge; people who were there could speak to that better.

IE wasn't built-in to Windows 95, it was part of the Plus Pack — an optional add-on.¹

I'm pretty sure 95 had built-in tcp/ip stack since launch.

Winsock was an add-on. It wasn't included with Windows until Windows 98².

Apples early web-browser forays (Cyberdog) were notably short-lived.

Apple's Cyberdog is irrelevant. There's a lot more to the internet than web browsers, and people on Macs were there.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock