Is Microsoft extending its reach TOO far?

I recently came across a post on Molly.com and she had published an interesting “rant” on an old 2005 Business Week article about Microsoft’s interesting (and somewhat naiive) claim to want to rule the web. In light of the massive “escapes” in Microsoft from its associates to other and/or better opportunities, Steve Ballmer, the CEO, claims that with some major changes being made to the company, their next goal was to include taking over the web. And why not? According to Ballmer, “We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web.“

Thankfully, Molly and her gang of folks working on the Web Standards Project are rising up to protest against this imperialist expansion and defend us regular folks from Microsoft’s terrany. Imagine this, this software giant…creator of such “hits” as the Windows operating system — now forceably required on most PC computers, if not all, makers of Microsoft Office applications, and the ever-so-popular Internet Explorer. Name one of these products that doesn’t have a flaw and then maybe there is some hope left. Chances are that none of them are flawless…which means that if Microsoft were to “win the Web”, as Steve Ballmer so eloquently put it, then our Internet experience would be so much more worse.