>> According to the history books, the story goes that IBM wanted an OS, 
>> Gate's mum knew somebody at IBM, so Gates stole an OS off one of his 
>> mates and made it work on the IBM PC. IBM PCs became popular for some 
>> reason, and the rest is history.
> 
> I think you have a rather twisted telling of that story there. :-)

Microsoft's entire history seems to revolve around stealing other 
people's stuff and watching them go bankrupt faster than they can sue.

>>> nobody could provide any decent competition back then.
>>
>> I doubt that was the reason.
> 
> Name two competitors. Were you even in the market at the time it was 
> hashing out?

When the hell was the IBM PC invented anyway?

>> I wasn't referring only to Windows; M$ make other products as well. 
>> (Most notably Office, but also things like VisualStudio, IIS, 
>> Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) Other people manage to make similar 
>> products which work significantly better, 
> 
> Do they? What works better than Exchange?

Actually... I'm not aware of anything else that does what Exchange does. 
Which is a little bit odd, really.

I know of a few office suites that manage to not constantly crash like 
MS Office does. Apache is notable for doing the same thing as IIS while 
being actually secure and less of a resource hog. (I will admit it's a 
PITA to configure though...) There are lots of database engines out 
there; I doubt many of them are worse than SQL Server.

I've yet to see an IDE that isn't horribly slow, bloated and inflexible. 
I guess in that respect VS is no worse than any other IDE.

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