Flaser, the problem is much deeper than this...
MS may not be the fairest player ever known, but everyone forgets that they become what they are because people preferred them, and not because anyone forced them...
Here is a little history:
1975-1980
More than MS it was IBM versus Apple, and basically IBM won the market thanks to lower prices...
They chose MS DOS because it was the only one both "user friendly" (for the time) and fitting for IBM future plans (fortunately they failed)
1983
MS-IBM separation.
Basically IBM dumped MS because they were launching they superuberduper OS2, known to the experts as IBM market domination 2.0.
Basically they got the core functions of Windows 1.0 (still in development) and tried to make something capable to run on both PCs and mainframes... they did it, but the problem was that it was slow as hell (15 minutes to boot) and the forced compatibility stripped down 90% of potential features, making it pratically a featureless mainframe consolle (oh yeah, we can port any mainframe app on OS2! Look! it takes only 5 minutes to start!).
That made just MS in the right place, being cheaper than apple but still many times better than IBM software (and in the meantime a 12 years long antitrust battled started for IBM...).
That was the reason of MS spreading into the PC world, and retrocompatibility did the rest...
Before someone starts complaining about Mac being ubercool and MS that copied from apple, the thruth is that both companies copied from Xerox, who made an experimental GUI OS for IBM before MS was chosen, but that was dumped...
1983-1995
Well, that was the most known DOS era, even though developers progressively complained about memory management, so that a 32bit OS was needed...
1995-today
Well, you know as much as myself what happened after 1995... due to software stability problems people started to dislike MS stuff, though when treated and cared well Win 9.x wasn't that unstable...
In the meantime antitrust started for MS too first with netscape (lol, and people complained because MS forced the browser market to run freeware... just like part of the linux community would do for everything), DOJ finally settled them, then AOL started again (they lost their monopolistic ISP position and blamed MS for that), and that one was settled too...
Realnetworks is just the same... if you wanna make cash blame MS... they complain because people won't pay for their player!
About the rest, kazan and me express prett clearly the different visions of the things...