If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation.
Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.
I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.
Alternatively: had MS Embraced and Extended harder instead of trying to extinguish ASAP we’d have a much better internet owned to a much higher degree by MS.
A few decades back Microsoft were first to the prize with asynchronous JavaScript, Silverlight really was flash done better and still missed, a proper extension of their VB6/MFC client & dev experience out to the web would have gobbled up a generation of SaaS offerings, and they had a first in class data analysis framework with integrated REPL that nailed the central demands of distributed/cloud-first systems and systems configuration (F#). That on top of near perfect control of the document and consumer desktop ecosystems and some nutty visualization & storage capabilities.
Plug a few of their demos from 2002 - 2007 together and you’ve got a stack and customer experience we’re still hurting for.
Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).
In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.
Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.
Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.
I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...