Microsoft software is, in many ways, substandard. but it has powered the PC revolution (for better or worse). Would anyone else have done it? I don't know. I remember reading years ago (early 90s) an interview with a senior MS Bod in which the interviewer asked whether Microsoft would support platforms other than the PC/Windows.
There reply was that MS would happily support any platform where they felt they could make money. For all their faults, they do seem to have fairly consistently stuck to that. Even during the 90s where they were done for anti-competitive practices, they experimented with Amiga support (sadly limited to the awful Amiga Basic), and were fairly actively supporting the Mac. Now, with their primary focus on the cloud, and not on software sales, they are actively supporting several competing platforms (Android, iOS, macOS) as well as Windows.
Of course, Microsoft (at least the 90s Microsoft) didn't want to compete on a given platform, they wanted to control it, but that is what they were done for.
But, would the PC revolution have happened without Microsoft? I don't think so, at least not with any of the other companies involved at the time. Most companies in th PC market at the time are likely to have tried to tie people to their own system. They wouldn't have wanted compatibility with the competition. Indeed, IBM perceived all the PC cloners as copyright infringers, and start legal action to try and stop a lot of them.. IBM would have locked the PC down to IBM (and perhaps Microsoft) operating systems. As would Apple. I daresay Dell, Gateway and a lot of the other manufactures would have done so as well. Even Apple (perhaps especially Apple).
Microsoft in the 90s didn't have a dedicated hardware platform to push, at least in terms of PCs (they have had various mobile, tablet and console platforms). They just cared that whatever PC the user ran, they were running Windows and other MS software on it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
