While most histories of Microsoft focus on two obvious areas of general interest---the company’s founding and early years, and its historic antitrust trials in the U.S. and Europe---I’m taking a different approach here. Instead, I am focusing on the history of a specific product, Windows, and on the forces that shaped it and, in turn, shaped Microsoft and the personal computing industry.

For this reason, we’ll examine antitrust only insofar as it impacted Windows. And we’ll start with an existential threat that dominated Microsoft’s attention in the late 1990s, Netscape and its Navigator web browser.