To give some flavor: I was working at a 3D modeling company that was working on a license deal with MS to provide models for the new Direct3D. We needed a way to browse and visualize models; Java applets was all the rage, and I even found a cool voxel component that would let people see the geometry without giving them the actual geometry.

MS and Netscape both had a set of "foundation classes". Netscape's were much, much better, so, given the time constraints, I used those. Because of a little bit of window dressing in the scroll bars, somebody from a recent acquisition noticed it was Netscape's classes and, by itself, that killed my project and almost killed the entire deal.

The nineties were an ugly time for software development, thanks to Microsoft.