I can say I was never a part of that (I was an Atari and Amiga user, and disliked Microsoft mainly due to how much they were still playing catch up. If it weren't for the fact that Atari and Commodore sat on their awesome operating systems for so long, it'd be a completely different landscape right now. Windows 95 came out 10 years after the original Amiga and only then started to have most of the features. Dumbasses at Commodore... but I digress...)

The thing with the Windows 95 launch was that it was Microsoft's real attempt at not sucking. They haven't really done anything major as far as innovating in their operating system since, except for Windows 8. And this time around they have failed miserably.

At least they had the money to do this, as we can already see by my earlier bit in this post, if you sit on what you have for 10+ years, you're going to go no where. If there had still been some serious competition out there, MS wouldn't have survived for so long by just "ooh, now it's shiny." that they have been doing.

slaapliedje

Edit; Oh, not just money, but MASSIVE install base. All that old software that people can't do without that is Windows only.