People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.
They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs specifically for games, which eventually powered their own gaming console. They were practically the only company doing this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go. This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were just no alternatives.
Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC gaming landscape as we know it today.
Regardless, it seems silly to claim that Microsoft's 30+ years of supporting Windows to make it the dominant gaming platform on PC rests on the shoulders of 3 employees. I don't have any insider knowledge, but it would be safe to assume that this was a long-term strategic decision for the company. I can imagine the existence of internal detractors at every step of this direction, but what they've achieved and their position today is surely the result of the successful execution of this vision, and not something they stumbled into by chance.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...