Isn’t this backwards? Microsoft had way less competition on the desktop in the 90s than they do now.
On the desktop, I don't believe Microsoft has had significant competition for quite some time, likely back to Windows 95. In the server space, NT fought really hard against the UNIX giants of the time.
I do not think so. The Windows - OS/2 war was a big fight that Microsoft won on merits. Windows 95 was revolutionary at the time, folks queued at the malls on the release day to get it, bugs and all.
They fought the compiler wars with real engineering, giving Borland a run for the money. Different people have different opinions about Visual Studio. As a Linux user since 0.9 I did not like its architecture and focus on GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it as a consistent framework done by excellent engineers. And so on.