[averagewall]

Part of why they succeeded was by being first. Linux was certainly much worse than Windows in the early days when people still used DOS together with Windows. Being first means it was massively better for those people at that time.

Plan9 lost out to Linux, perhaps partly by being too late. Do we blame Linux for being horrible?

[beagle3]

As a user of both circa 1994 - no, Linux was definitely not worse. It was about a thousand times more stable, though it lacked e.g. A word processor.

When Microsoft produced win 2 and 3, they unfairly (and likely illegally) used their DOS and then Windows monopoly to stop competitors (DR DOS, BeOS, a few lesser known ones); they later used the Windows monopoly to embed IE and kill Netscape. It didn't matter that IE was, in fact, a better browser - everyone wanted Netscape, and it was only with the IE4 merge into the OS that Microsoft took the internet.

I was involved with one of the smaller and less famous Microsoft victims at the time, and I can assure you that regardless of technical merits, MS made very significant progress by playing dirty.

They paid billions in court for it, but economically it was worth it to them.