They were late to the internet party all around. But when they did decide to get on the ball they put a lot of the leaders out of business by finally putting the TCP/IP stack in the OS. Which really was a good idea in the early 90s.

Microsoft took quite a while to start paying attention to this hippie / academic Internet thing. They were pretty late to the party.

Of course, when they decided to release "Internet Explorer for Unix" (IIRC, for SunOS and HPUX) in about 1997, coming late didn't prevent them from marketing it with a widely ridiculed phrase along the lines of "Bringing the Internet to Unix".

Indeed, interesting to known why. The domain came online at May 2, 1991.

Microsoft have always been followers, not leaders. The Internet was just a curiosity, of interest mainly to academics before the early 90s.