I have a sort of different take on MS than most people.
I believe that MS was very instrumental to the extremely rapid advancement of PC hardware technology. How you ask seeing as they are a software company? very easy. As Nem has said, and he is right, MS put themselves, whether intentionally or not, in a monopoly situation as far as OS. This helped myriads of hardware companies because they only had one OS to try and make stuff work with. Imagine how much additional effort these companies would have had to go through if they had 10 different OSs that they had to make their stuff compatible with? How many of them would have gone to that effort? Not many. They would have stuck to one or two and ignored the rest. This would have led to a very fractured industry and not many companies would have made it very long. But with all these companies working with one basic standard, not a very good one at times, they were able to innovate knowing that they products would work with other companies products since they are all geared to the same thing, make it work with Windows.
An example of what I'm talking about is shown in the Linux world. While all the versions use the same basic kernal, not all of them do things in the same way. This makes creating drivers much more work as they not only have to make them for the different kernal releases, they have to make them work with multiple flavours of Linux. I believe that for Linux to really come out as an alternative to Windows, they need to decide on some basic standards that will address the problems that hardware makers, and third party software makers have in this area. Once this happens and peolpe can make one set of drivers for every linux version out there and they can write one program, like games, that can be installed on all the versions, then you will really see Linux come on as an alternative.
and before Nem can point this out, I do seem to recall reading how this process, the creation of standards in Linux distros, is starting to happen. And I for one hope it happens sooner rather than later.