[SoftwareMaven]

Microsoft went down the D3D (well, the entire DirectX) path to court developers. They knew Windows95 could be much more successful if they could make it so developers could more easily write games for it. Developers were dying for reasonable abstraction layer on PC hardware. When 3D hardware became affordable, OpenGL continued its primary focus on perfection, which didn't give game developers what they needed (good enough, but FAST).

(Side note: If you ever want to pull your hair out, try going back in time to convert a DOS game written in X86 assembly using Mode X[0] blts that had been converted and tweaked from 68k assembly standing arcade game into a DirectX game a few months after DirectX is released for Windows95. Just figuring out how to convert the game time [which came from the sound card] into the DirectX world was unreal.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X