@mactonite m$ pretty manipulated and bribed web developers and companies into using their proprietary web server (IIS), web "design" software, web "interface" and plugin systems (i.e. silverlight) and the end result was endless websites, including non-optional government ones that only worked in "internet explorer", due to a complete lack of standards-compliance and bug-dependent functionality.

Pretty much, microsoft's rent for their software is so extremely high so that suckers who have fallen into their lock-in tarpit will gladly do almost anything in exchange for a discount and will gladly proceed to make webpages with microsoft software if commanded so (one more recent example was when microsoft offered a steep discount for some "product" (the name I can't recall) to any "sysadmin" sort if they went and voted for their "OOXML" "format" instead of a real format like say ODF in standards body format polls and suddenly there was huge "support" for "OOXML").


This is a distant memory that many people will claim never happened thanks to how m$'s tentacles no longer strangle most websites, but it seems they're trying it again with their "remote attestation" schemes (for "security" reasons, only clients that attest that the client is running only approved versions of certain proprietary OS's and the user hasn't modified can access this website).