This weirdly took me back to a chance conversation I had in the late 90s with the development manager for Internet Explorer. I asked him a technical question about a new feature I thought IE might be getting. He had no idea what I was talking about, and said (almost verbatim), "Now that Netscape is essentially dead, we really have no motivation to innovate in the browser space." This was about at the end of the transition period when the money people took over MS from the geeks, and I remember thinking yeahhh, this is the end. The feature I was asking about was "back channel requests" - later known as AJAX. I believe it was first implemented natively by Firefox and then Microsoft (who could have done it like 5 years sooner) scrambled to play catch-up - which by then was their standard pattern.