merc

No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft's damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.

The reason AOL didn't know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft's price of free, they had no real business model anymore.

That's the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.

You prefer feudalism?

What role does the jet have to fulfill? Fight off enemy planes in an invasion? If it's the US that invades you wouldn't want US tech, but it doesn't really matter, the US would win. Russia invading? At this point they're down to kites and helium balloons, right?

If it's to fulfill a role within NATO, a Gripen is probably just as good as an F-35, because any enemy of NATO's will almost certainly be many generations behind. China wouldn't be, but neither Canada directly nor NATO is likely to get into a direct fighting war with China. Only maybe if Canada wanted to help defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression could that possibly happen. But, because Taiwan's a small island, Canada's Navy would probably be the main force involved.

In a few decades, things might already have changed. Missiles and drones might have made fighter jets essentially obsolete. So, it doesn't make too much sense to buy something that's massively expensive just because it's the most up-to-date thing right now.

You wouldn't even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.

e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it's really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That's fine if what you're looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it's pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.

^ Canadian

WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.

But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.

As for Outlook, I've never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it's available by default and it's the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There's a reason its nickname is "outhouse". Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn't quite work right.

With Microsoft it's always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It's what they're now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn't, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.

The "evil" in Google's motto "Don't be evil" was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren't even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren't able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.

If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it's a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.

Or if you're from New Zealand and your cow-orker Margaret prefers you to use one of its rarer diminutive forms.

Lately the washer has taken to flash "AI Cycle Complete"

Lately? Does that mean your washer is getting some kind of regular firmware updates? Why? In case "laundry" changes?

Not true at all. Businesses didn't move onto the next product, they specialized, making the exact same thing year after year. Because manufacturing tolerances weren't great, things would need repairs and replacement, so there was repeat business. Nobody kept a buffer stock and moved onto the next product.

That sounds like a difficult way to run a business.