Don't quote me on this but one mildly interesting aspect of Access's birth (1992?) is that Microsoft struck hard at the competition's knees (I think "dBASE" by Ashton Tate was the most popular desktop database product at the time) to capture market share (as they say), selling the first version of Access for something like 99 USD. They obviously took a similar approach with IE (no charge), pullling users away from Netscape.
Regards,
Tim