The Importance of Bill Gates' Vision of the Internet

It's become something of accepted wisdom that Microsoft somehow missed the internet or at least got it a bit too late. I think what actually happened is a bit more complicated and so let's go into some of my reasoning on this. To begin with let's play devil's advocate and take the assumption that Bill Gates missed the internet. If he did so there were certainly good reasons for him to have been distracted. The federal government blocked Microsoft's long attempted takeover of Intuit leaving the financial software niche as the only major software market that Microsoft never conquered.