In contrast to other operating system vendors, Microsoft both refused to license its operating system without a browser and imposed restrictions — at first contractual and later technical — on OEMs' and end users' ability to remove its browser from its operating system. As its internal contemporaneous documents and licensing practices reveal, Microsoft decided to bind Internet Explorer to Windows in order to prevent Navigator from weakening the applications barrier to entry, rather than for any pro-competitive purpose...
Microsoft's executives believed that the incentives that its contractual restrictions placed on OEMs would not be sufficient in themselves to reverse the direction of Navigator's usage share. Consequently, in late 1995 or early 1996, Microsoft set out to bind Internet Explorer more tightly to Windows 95 as a technical matter. The intent was to make it more difficult for anyone, including systems administrators and users, to remove Internet Explorer from Windows 95 and to simultaneously complicate the experience of using Navigator with Windows 95. As Brad Chase wrote to his superiors near the end of 1995, "We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer, so that running any other browser is a jolting experience." ...
Starting with Windows 95 OSR 2, Microsoft placed many of the routines that are used by Internet Explorer, including browsing-specific routines, into the same files that support the 32-bit Windows APIs. Microsoft's primary motivation for this action was to ensure that the deletion of any file containing browsing-specific routines would also delete vital operating system routines and thus cripple Windows 95.
So while it was originally a marketing decision -- the two were tied together specifically to put competitors at a disadvantage -- the implementation of that decision was not just marketing. It was implemented technically too, to the point where removing IE from a copy of Windows would break the OS. So regardless of the motivation behind the decision, the fact remains that the two things are tangled up with each other quite deeply.
Microsoft could have gone back at a later point and un-tangled them, but that would have been a huge project, and there was no real motivation for them to do so -- the settlement agreement that ended the antitrust case didn't require them to, and the market wasn't rejecting Windows with IE tied into it. So it stayed tangled up.
The big irony is that by tying the OS and browser together to get an advantage over their competitors, they ended up disadvantaging themselves. Those competitors can now turn out new versions of their browsers at a fast clip, because they're not tied to any release schedule other than their own. IE is tied to Windows' release schedule, however, so it improves at a glacial pace compared to other browsers, making it less competitive over time.
This is probably 50% of the game which makes Microsoft money with the Enterprise.
You're thinking of the Consumer market.
the life would so much happier without all that enterprise software crap that works only on IE. "Works only with IE" is like a hallmark of usability/quality/performance one can expect from the hallmarked application. And is not just correlation, it is usually a strong causation as the real reason behind it is that the application was most probably produced by mediocre at best team using some enterprise framework treated like a black box.
>This is probably 50% of the game which makes Microsoft money with the Enterprise.
absolutely. I'm always fascinated by how user-candy MS ecosystem looks to an Enterprise on the first date (vs. say Linux) and how bad things become almost immediately once they move in together.