The ability to one-shop the whole office experience helped. So you could deal with microsoft for the OS and word.....etc or Microsoft for os and there for your

The ability to one-shop the whole office experience helped. So you could deal with microsoft for the OS and word.....etc or Microsoft for os and there for your WP and lots of other companies making support a multi number TZ experience compared to a one-stop shop like Microsoft. This is also around the era of NT4 becoming mature and oh, did they push around that. I recall getting a crazy deal in which was after NT4 server but they had a bundle that was cheaper and you got the whole Backoffice bundle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server ) and of course, helped promote their ecosystem even further. So many alternative offerings just get pushed out, be it price or the cost of marketing to get new sales being a bridge too far. Many carried on in some form for while with their hard-core loyal users from old but even that didn't sustain them. I recall also IBM buying one of these word alternatives and trying to create their own bundle offering, but alas that and equally the PC market slipped thru their fingers. In part from their half-cocked push on OS/2, which alas never really got the public traction it could of got and often wonder what could of been upon that. > I think the thing that made them able to succeed was the experience with Excel and Word for Mac. By writing these, they learned a lot of lessons on how best to allow software to take advantage of a GUI. Then when Windows took off, they could apply these lessons that competitors who had mainly focused on their DOS based user interfaces did not learn. YES the whole GUI aspect really did help Microsoft push their offerings as they worked, but then they did have inside help as they knew what API's would work (and quirks) and how to use them ahead of others. Equally if they wanted something not available, they had the clout to get it added. This along with GUI's add one heck of overhead upon your application development and was a few gotcha's. I do recall having issues using some OCX(iirc) feature that just would bug badly and retorted to logging a ticket with Microsoft for them to come back and say, we have looked into it and yes it is broken, we will fix it in the new version. Which meant upgrading everything and kinda killed that whole project in the end as was a fair few of those. Whilst it didn't do heavy development with Windows back then, my experiences sure tainted me and I'm sure those deeper in that trench will have some even uglier battle stories. Maybe why finding out undocumented API's back then was more a thing as many instances of you can't do that but there is an undocumented API that will do that and Microsoft product X,y.Z....all use it to add that feature. Was interesting times and yet, was enough to put me of doing development upon Windows even to this day as just got burned too many times. SO yes, I can see how things may of played out for those wonderful DOS applications transitioning towards GUI land with Windows.