They put a PC on every desk, today was a slow day and I used at least a dozen flavors of Microsoft….all of them for free.
It’s also important to stress the free part, they don’t pursue piracy and just elect to recoup those losses by charging their Fortune 500 clients a bit more.
People will point out to the DOJ proceedings in 2000, but I have no sympathy for paper millionaires who didnt cash out in times of fat cows and didnt realize that software is a winner take all market. Even less sympathy for ideological people who want to impose their niche preferences over everybody else.
99% of people use computers to access informations , communicate with the world and to store/manipulate written or numerical data. Nobody makes all those 3 tasks easier than Microsoft.