Micro$oft had a lot of help in overcoming the competition; some of those companies that Micro$oft now dominates actually did it to themselves by a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone.
Take the case of the three giants of the 80's... LOTUS Development, WordPerfect Corporation and Novell all of whom virtually dominated the software scene in the 80's.
LOTUS had the best selling LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the best selling Freelance Graphics, the best selling LOTUS SmartSuite and the hugely successful LOTUS Notes.
WordPerfect had the best selling WordPerfect word processor.
Novell had the only real viable network on the market and was number one.
Every computer magazine you looked at in the 80's had LOTUS and / or WordPerfect as the cover stories; "How 1-2-3 does this or how it does that" and so on; little Micro$oft was nowhere to be found.
In the 80's, Micro$oft was only this little company that made money form the sale of DOS licenses ($60 million a year) and the Basic language program. Windows in the mid 80's was mostly nothing more then smoke and mirrors. Micro$oft office was not a player back then; it was all about LOTUS SmartSuite.
The two companies (LOTUS and WordPerfect), although totally separate and in different states, built up such a wonderful relationship that a LOTUS 1-2-3 user could actually call WordPerfect for 1-2-3 problems and could get help for both 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Most computer users at the time used both programs on a daily basis.
I worked for 16 years as a spreadsheet developer for many large companies from the mid 80's to late 90's; 1-2-3, WordPerfect and a Novell network were always the main programs in daily use.
In the early 90's Mitch Kapore, founder and CEO of LOTUS, worked out a deal with WordPerfect for the two giants to merge to fend of the upstart Micro$oft. All was going well, an agreement was worked out, both companies saw this as a done deal, the press saw it as a done deal, until a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone took over. The two CEO's could not agree on who was going to be the new CEO of the new combined giant. The end result was that the so-called done deal fell apart all because to hard-headed idiots could not see past their own arrogance.
Next Mitch Kapore set his sights on the then giant Novell. It was a done deal (again) only to be scuttled by you guessed it, once again a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone took over. Again, the end results being that it fell through at the last minute.
Mitch Kapore saw himself as the new Bill Gates running a mega company consisting of LOTUS, WordPerfect and Novell. If it had all happened as Kapore envisioned, we would today be talking about someone else other then Micro$oft.
The end results to all this was that Micro$oft finally came into their own with Windows 3.1 and Office and the rest as they say, is history.
I'm no real Micro$oft fan but you have to admit that running a computer in the dirty ol' days of DOS was no fun at all...
* If you wanted to have a program pop up and do other neat things like Windows does so easily, you had to load what was called a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program. The problem was that DOS was not designed to run with TSR's and a lot of them simply caused the computer to lock up requiring a reboot (and you thought that was a unique Windows thing, huh?).
* Each program you loaded such as 1-2-3 had to have its own set of four drivers; one each for the keyboard, monitor, printer, and fonts.
* Fonts were a real nightmare as there was no standard, you had a hard time trying to copy a document made by one program into another program as the fonts were often not recognized by the other program. What you saw on screen seldom if every looked the same when it was printed as the screen fonts seldom matched up with the printer fonts. The problem was that fonts back then were fixed in size meaning there had to be separate fonts for each size from 8 pt to 72 pt; what a total mess. Each program used its own idea of what fonts should look like; another total mess causing incompatibilities between programs. Windows 3.1 changed all that with common drivers for all programs and scalable TrueType fonts that finally gave us the same printouts as we saw on screen.
In the dirty ol' days of DOS each new program came with one to three very large, thick 200 or 400 page three-ring binder(s) of instructions; it was needed as no two programs were used in the same way and the learning curve was very high. Function keys varied from one program to other, even the Help key was often different. There were no icons to speed us along. Everything was menu driven and even then there were no standards.
So, yes we can bash Micro$oft all we want, but they brought us standards that was so lacking in the days of DOS. I often can install a brand new program and get right to work using it with a minimum of learning as so many things are now common among all programs.
Windows is not perfect, but I would not want to go back to the old DOS days at all.