This is a "head in the cloud" analysis that ignores practicality.

Let's look at your specific examples. BeOS was a beautiful and elegant OS, but from what I've heard it was a nightmare to develop for. Even today there are holdouts who continue to run FreeBSD and even AmigaOS and OS/2 but that doesn't seem to be the case with BeOS. Somehow, despite its excellence along one particular axis it missed out on enough other necessities to stunt its popularity. I don't think you can rest that failure entirely on MS's shoulders.

As far as Win 9x vs. OS/2 and NT, that's another case where things are not so simple. Windows 95 was a grand compromise. It was a bit of the next generation OS core along the lines of NT with a few carefully crafted modifications designed to provide a better balance of the characteristics and features that were the most important for the average user.

When you run a 16-bit application in NT or OS/2 you have a 2 to 4mb overhead per application due to the VM. This is all fine and dandy if you have enough ram, but back in 1995 4mb of ram was a several hundred dollar investment. In 1995 the next consumer version of Windows was faced with that crisis. How do you bring up the level of the OS to a modern foundation (from DOS/Win 3.x) in a world where the vast majority of users are still running quite a lot of 16-bit applications without forcing a crazily impractical and expensive minimum system requirement in terms of RAM on customers? The answer that Windows 95 came up with was a combination of a shared VM for all 16-bit apps along with some serious assembly level manual performance optimization to a lot of components. This allowed the Windows 95 minimum system requirements to be a mere 4mb total, which was well within what a lot of consumers had on their existing systems.

The result was one of the most successful software products of all time. It's easy to look back on Windows 95 and see its flaws but in its time it was a very solid offering at a consumer level.

Completely agree. People hate Gates and Microsoft for some really silly reasons. Windows 95? It was a brave and revolutionary OS. Would world switch to Linux, Mac or BeOS if there was no Win95? No way it would, it would wait for Windows 4. Internet Explorer 6? Great, great browser by the time it was released. Really, whoever calls that 'crap, uninnovative software' wasn't there in 2001. Office? By far the best office software suite out there. Windows XP? People use it to this day and are so happy about it they don't want to change if for newer and better systems.

Of course there were things that MS did wrong (especially on the business side of things) but the whole hatred thing is, in my opinion, more like a kind of pop-culture than something based on facts. Just look at Xbox360 - it only took to not advertise it as a Microsoft creation and kids who ridicule Windows on a day-to-day basis are now "Halo fanboys".

As for the Jobs quotes - if these were taken as some kind of a gospel or a road sign we all should hate Android by now. Actually, it amazes me that Jobs is so glorified here, while Gates always gets the flack - after all the word "hacker" suits the latter a lot more.

A few points worthy of note:

MS has terrible taste (as Jobs famously pointed out), and a lot of people hate companies with a bad sense of fashion and taste. That's a big reason why people hate walmart, I expect.

MS has been a bully and has used its size to gain an unfair advantage from time to time. However, in general I'd say that MS is actually less guilty of this sort of thing than the average run-of-the-mill company of a similar size. Compare and contrast with, say, AEG, Bank of America, or Archer-Daniels-Midland for example. On a properly calibrated evil-o-meter MS hardly registers.

Finally, it's easy to develop a strong mental picture of a hypothetical "better" world, even if that world is wholly impractical. There are fundamental reasons why linux, to this day, is still not the best choice for the average consumer desktop. Even down to a fundamental technological design level there are good reasons why that's so (though there's also android, which still has a delicious linux core). The truth is that "the man" hasn't been holding back electric car technology, solar power, and linux on the desktop merely to prop up big oil and Microsoft. Sometimes it takes time for competing technologies to mature to a level to where they are actually competitive. Linux has done awesomely in the server market, for example, even despite MS's massive expenditures to make substantial inroads.

You've offered no proof or even speculation people wouldn't switch if 95 didn't exist. OS/2 Warp was a modest hit the same year and was advocated by technical people for years. It was much more solid yet still user friendly. There were other decent choices as we've mentioned.

I like XP and still use it, but it doesn't fit into the thread about MS halting innovation during the 90's.

I worked in IT during the 90's and Win9x crashed several times a day from drivers, lack of resources, and "rundll not responding...". Maybe you've forgotten, but I haven't. I had to diagnose hundreds of machines with those symptoms, ...it was shit. It's true 95 installed on 4MB ram, but it was slower than molasses, constantly swapping.

The fact that no other OS was perfect is irrelevant. They never had a chance, no matter if the were good or great, from lowly DOS clones all the way up to modern OSs because MS didn't allow it via a bag of dirty tricks.

OS/2 was originally developed by a combination of MS and IBM. It was a much better/more stable OS (I developed on it for a couple of years in the early 90s and used to pity those people in our team left on DOS or the toy Windows OS), but it had one major flaw - it was targetted only at IBM hardware, at least in the first few years. With most of the world heading towards cheap clones, that pretty much killed it as a real commercial option.

OS/2 was still a severely compromised design. It was 'better' but it still crashed a lot and would have required a transition to a modern OS.

The IBM requirement was even more onerous because IBM had linked OS/2 with PS/2 Microchannel hardware. IBM had this locked up with patents and could have used it to to control the entire PC industry had it caught on. So everyone else in the 'open' PC world had an interest in seeing OS/2-PS/2 fail.

(IBM was the last major vendor to offer PC-based server hardware because they were trying to protect their midrange machines. I think if OS/2 had taken over, they would have prevented the entire x86 server market from getting off the ground until much later than it did.)