It is true, but it's also an excuse for many companies that become complacent and were slow to move to Windows and invested too little - Borland had shown it was possible to compete with MS on its own ground - and deliver UIs better than MS ones. Adobe was successful to port its Mac applications to Windows, despite the high graphic requirements.
Take some time, and read the history of WordPerfect, Lotus, Corel, Borland, etc. - lots of executive mistakes that had nothing to do with MS trying to put obstacles on their path. The same obstacles were put under DOS, and still many companies were able to outperform MS - just they become too fearful to invest in keeping the pace with the evolution of hardware and OS.
Again, did you use Lotus, WordPerfect and Corel software? I did, and it was too often less usable - Lotus idea of inventing its own UI under Windows - and a less versatile one - was truly a stupid idea. WordPerfect tried to have the same application under DOS and Windows, another dummy idea.
And all of them were very slow to fix bugs. I spent endless time on the phone with Lotus support to investigate bugs, and they were never fixed.
Notes was an ugly mail client, and its underlying non-relational database was truly a pain to work with. I never understood companies trying to build applications upon it instead of using a true RDBMS and better tools to develop clients.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
