Microsoft's stranglehold over the browser market was a pretty huge problem, irrespective of their business model. The web is way too important to be so tightly controlled by one single company, no matter who they may be.
Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
Of course, Firefox and later Chrome came around, so in the end the Web kicked Microsoft's ass anyway.
> Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
I think it was a bit more general: "We want to keep a stranglehold on the Apis used to write general software". The ability to write software once for the web and have it work on web browsers on any platform was viewed as an existential threat.
However, the observation that they only developed IE as long as they were worried about that threat and then left it to rot afterwards is spot on.
Their strategy was aimed against their competitors interests, not their users interests. Microsoft in the bad old days still saw their users as paying customers and not just a source of data to be exploited.
It isn't Microsoft that has entered the extinguish phase for ad blocking browser add-ons. I also don't remember Microsoft doing anything as anti-user as trying to keep pop-up blockers from working back in the bad old days.
Pop-ups were universally reviled, but also explorer aggressively pushed lots of random half features to support their products - the only difference is that they didn't publish a "spec" as google uses to create a veneer of not being anti-user.
MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D
I'd say that the issue with Google's control of web standards stem from their surveillance capitalism business model.