Originally Posted by VRPdommy

While I do agree that MS has made many monopolistic moves and many just stupid ones (from our viewpoint) and I don't like much of what they do.
But if you have been around this since the beginning, you should step back and realize the good they have done for the industry and yourself.
I remember the industry going in many wild tangents where no one standard was being used, everything was proprietary, in something as simple as 'how you operate a program' to 'exchanging data between programs'. So going from one program to the next was a complete new learning task, even if they did the same thing.

Windows was the first to really address that issue, mainly with v3.0 being the first viable version. I was using Deskview for multitasking at that time and continued till about 2000 for specialized dos programs as windows grew on me mainly for/from the web in 94. But Netscape started off as a dos program. Windows did make it better. multitasking in deskview could be a pain getting time slices correct. But at least it had a lean workable interface.

While that is just the tip of the iceberg, I think many take to much for granted now and fail to give credit where it is due. It did advance all platforms and software no matter how you think about it. Even though I may not like some of the means they used to get there. But this is how capitalism plays without proper governess. And few of us were complaining about the behavior at the time, just being happy to get better and faster stuff on the cheap (hacked software). That has not seemed to change even today.