I remember my early days with computing. The main reason that we use Microsoft was we had it free. You would find the floppies of DOS and Windows almost every students bag. They even didn't bother by the fact that many companies using their software illegally. If you go back and compare every single product of them with competitors, you will see that none of them would match before 94 (they still hardly match except the market share).
But they become corporate/industry standards because generations hit shores of business life 'by default' with Microsoft skills. Since no body wants to train their employees, unless there are certain -turnover- expectations, those crappy OSs, office programs, 'groupware's, databases, application development tools, web development products became the cutting edge technology. People, knew them, learned them, because they were 'intentionally' made available for illegal (free) usage, as long as it's amateur passion. Then this 'amateur passion' became business logic.
Now they are the monopoly. Even more annoyingly, they have no intention of producing a peace of decent operating system. Why? They have money, they have people, and they have the market. Why? Backward compatibility? They don't give a shit about backward compatibility; for instance, every new version of MS Access cannot convert an older version database file. Every year we have a new operating system which actually, again the same good old DOS. Even their most appreciated engineering stuff NT (or 2k) crashes so often, people don't use NTFS (so good old FAT is the best).
What can I say? WANKERS!!!
