There are two ways to become successful. One is to provide more value than the competition and thus gain market share, and the other is to destroy the competition by any means other than trying to make a better product or service. That way people have no choice but to buy from you, and this is what Microsoft had done over the years. Having no competition means you don't have to try making a better product, and consumers suffer as a result.
I agree that in the beginning they certainly did provide the right product at the right time. They bought an exclusive license to QDOS from a company called SCP for $50,000, changed it around a bit to conform to what IBM wanted, and licensed it as MS-DOS to IBM for the IBM PC line. Although even then they later got sued by SCP for not disclosing their partnership with IBM when they bought QDOS, and Microsoft settled with them for $1 million. Still, this in my opinion is a perfectly fine way to go. That is, buy something from one company and resell to another one for much more if there's such an opportunity. Though if MS agreed to settle with SCP for that much money (remember this was 1981 and a million bucks was worth more than it is now) I can't help but think that their contract with SCP didn't allow them to do what they had done.
Later on they had done much more unscrupulous things, such as forcing all PC makers to only ship computers with DOS/Windows or lose their license to sell computers with DOS/Windows. They also deliberately targeted Netscape Communications and eventually destroyed them by shipping Internet Explorer with Windows. I believe they either didn't allow PC makers to ship Netscape with Windows or penalized them for it in some way. This was the subject of the anti-trust suit brought against Microsoft by the US government which MS lost. MS also lost an anti-trust suit in Europe a few years ago, and paid a fine of $613 million. Lack of competition in the browser market caused stagnation for years -- Internet Explorer was at version 6 from 2001 until a few months ago, and most of the IE 7 improvements can be attributed to new competition from Firefox.
The point is that if there had been true competition between Windows and other operating systems, Microsoft would not have been so successful. They simply never made anything of high quality. I think there's a very good chance that Linux will cause a downfall of Windows because it's an excellent competitor. Microsoft is incredibly scared of Linux because there's nothing for them to destroy -- no single company owns Linux. What MS is trying to do right now is scare people off from using Linux by saying that Linux infringes on MS software patents, and MS is threatening to sue those who use Linux. They recently made a partnership with Novell (who owns SuSE Linux) and then said that only those who use SuSE Linux are safe from being sued. Looks like they're getting desperate..
But don't take my word for it, Wikipedia has a long article called
Criticism of Microsoft. There are endless examples of illegal and unethical things they had done.
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In the 1990s, Microsoft adopted exclusionary licensing under which PC manufacturers were required to pay for an MS-DOS license even when the system shipped with an alternative operating system. Critics allege that it also used predatory tactics to price its competitors out of the market and that Microsoft erected technical barriers to make it appear that competing products did not work on its operating system. An investigation by the United States Department of Justice on August 21, 1993 resulted in an opinion stating that this behavior was illegal; in a consent decree issued on July 15, 1994, Microsoft agreed to a deal in which, among other things, that the company would not "tie" other Microsoft products into its operating system.
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