In response to the limited capabilities of HTML at the time, Microsoft began developing an online content authoring platform that would be based on distributed OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which it codenamed Blackbird.
[2] As a challenge, Marc Andreessen of Netscape announced a set of new products that would help transform their browser into what he called an "Internet OS" that would provide the tools and programming interfaces for a new generation of Internet-based applications.
[4] Andreessen explained that the newest versions of Navigator were not just web browsers, but suites of Internet applications, including programs for mail, FTP, news, and more, and would come with viewers for a variety of document types, like Adobe Acrobat, Apple QuickTime, and Sun Java applets, which would give it programming interfaces and publishing tools for developers.
Opposition in the industry to Microsoft began to grow, as did the concept of an "Internet OS", and this led to the formation of an alliance around developing Java as an alternative to Windows – the chief partners being Netscape, Sun, Oracle, and IBM.
[9] In what was called the "Java-tization of CORBA", the group was positioning Java to be a distributed object architecture, similar to what Microsoft had intended with OLE in Blackbird.
This would be the front for a new ecosystem based on open standards; first, HTML in the web browser; and second, Java, which they hoped would become widely adopted through CORBA.
[11] Microsoft and Intel in response to this challenge put forward a standard for a competing model called the NetPC, a diskless PC that would be primarily adapted to web browser use and would run a simplified version of Windows 95, codenamed Pegasus.
This strategy, which involved tightly bundling Internet Explorer in Windows, became the center of a United States antitrust suit against Microsoft.
[13] Google revived the idea of the Internet OS in 2009 with the development of ChromeOS, a Linux-based operating system designed to work exclusively with AJAX-based web applications.