On slightly thinner ice, Microsoft was at the height of "embracing, extending and extinguishing" the browser and internet at the time of the book. They failed in good part from completely misunderstanding, presumably at management level, their target. I'm sure many individual MS engineers understood well enough.

The era when you could put an activeX component on the desktop, or embed it into a screen saver, and some network services like ftp wouldn't be distinguished from just opening an explorer window. A world of (mostly teased but not delivered) Windows services you'd subscribe to like a series of cable channels, and when sites still backed either Netscape or IE with little "made for..." icons. Which stopped because MS thought they were "finished" with IE 6.

[Edit: IE 6 was rather later and understood, but balkanised the internet. IE 1 and 2 were interesting. Sort-of compatible but available via an MS view of the world - as an extra cost option in the Windows Plus! pack for Win 95. It was only Win 95 after some service pack that included IE in base. I'm not sure when downloads started, but initially I don't think you could]