Gatt writes:

I was a contractor at Netscape when IE4.0 came out. Basically, it looked
just like somebody stole the internal alpha copy of Netscape Communicator.

You may be thinking of an earlier version. The earlier versions of IE were
very inferior to Netscape, but IE4 was better. Netscape continued to goof
off, and Microsoft steamrollered them. Netscape will go down in history as
one of the worst-managed companies that ever existed.

In Netscape's case, the competition didn't "improve."

Yes, it did. Netscape had an early success because it had no competition, and
a later failure when it finally did have competition. Netscape made just
about every mistake one could imagine. They could have had it all, but they
settled for nothing.

They stole proprietary code ...

Ever heard of NCSA Mosaic?

... and used massive personnel resources to get it to market before the
smaller company.

No, they just wrote a better browser. Netscape was so busy patting itself on
the back that it didn't notice, and it never even tried to catch up.