I used to think this myself, but reading up on computing history I've somewhat changed my mind. If Bill Gates hadn't been born and Microsoft hadn't existed, what might have happened instead?
IBM would have still made the PC, only using another CP/M clone as OS, and would have owned that market because the other vendor wouldn't have written as clever a deal as Gates did. Two possible outcomes of that: either IBM would have replaced microsoft as center stone of the PC market and been no better and probably worse than microsoft (they were considered pretty evil in their day), or more likely IBM would have failed to create the PC platform (because that was really Microsoft's doing), and the personal computing market would have remained deeply fragmented on both hardware and software levels, tools for gamers and tinkerers but not business computing. In either case, OS/2 wouldn't have happened in the way that it did (especially since microsoft was a key developer behind that). Linux would have had a significantly tougher time happening, either because of IBM's control of the PC market (including the hardware), or in the fragmentation scenario because the lack of a hardware standard would have made it more difficult to build a community of OS enthusiasts. Apple would have probably gone bankrupt during Jobs' wilderness years. Without ms office propping it up as the only desktop alternative to DOS/windows it wouldn't have stood a chance given how incompetent apple's management was at the time.
So, maybe microsoft slowed down the personal computing market, or maybe they sped it up, or maybe they didn't change the timeline at all. I reckon there's no way to tell unless you have a time machine.
I wonder if Gates feels guilty though. His current efforts are laudable, but it always seems like he's compensating for something.
It's impossible to know as a whole, but you can still look at individual actions and say they were bad for the industry.
Probably one of the worst and most egregious is Microsoft's use of a "per processor" fee in the 90's which they only stopped when the government forced them to. If you were an OEM like Dell or HP, and sold Windows on any computers, you had to pay Microsoft for a copy of Windows on all computers you sold, even ones without Windows.
This anti-competitive move meant alternative operating systems, like BeOS, or OS2/Warp, or even Linux weren't really an option. BeOS died, not on any technical merits, but because Microsoft forced it out via other means. Linux only survived because its openness made it hard to kill.
IBM would have still made the PC, only using another CP/M clone as OS, and would have owned that market because the other vendor wouldn't have written as clever a deal as Gates did. Two possible outcomes of that: either IBM would have replaced microsoft as center stone of the PC market and been no better and probably worse than microsoft (they were considered pretty evil in their day), or more likely IBM would have failed to create the PC platform (because that was really Microsoft's doing), and the personal computing market would have remained deeply fragmented on both hardware and software levels, tools for gamers and tinkerers but not business computing. In either case, OS/2 wouldn't have happened in the way that it did (especially since microsoft was a key developer behind that). Linux would have had a significantly tougher time happening, either because of IBM's control of the PC market (including the hardware), or in the fragmentation scenario because the lack of a hardware standard would have made it more difficult to build a community of OS enthusiasts. Apple would have probably gone bankrupt during Jobs' wilderness years. Without ms office propping it up as the only desktop alternative to DOS/windows it wouldn't have stood a chance given how incompetent apple's management was at the time.
So, maybe microsoft slowed down the personal computing market, or maybe they sped it up, or maybe they didn't change the timeline at all. I reckon there's no way to tell unless you have a time machine.
I wonder if Gates feels guilty though. His current efforts are laudable, but it always seems like he's compensating for something.