One of the main things that Microsoft has done that is evil and still going on is use their monopoly to put inferior products into a market dominant position and then don't even bother to make them approach the capabilities of what they replaced.

With Office 2007, they did at least make a bold step of redoing the user interface, and abandoned the process of randomly making menu items in the standard menu not show up seemingly at random and made the standard menu options largely a thing of the past. I see this as progress, because between 1996 and now, that and the implementation of pivot tables is about all the newer MS Office had over Word Perfect and Quattro Pro. Even now, Excel seems incapable of producing readable graphs if your data has the slightest complexity, and the ability to customize graphs without using scripting is extremely limited. Quattro Pro did this with ease.

If you recall, IBM, although they let people make IBM compatible PCs, they used microchannel architecture which was incompatible with other manufacturers PCs, so their PCs were incompatible with many nifty things available for other computers. That was their downfall as much as anything else. Other PCs could do more because they could take advantage of nifty third party stuff.

For years, the saying went, nobody gets fired for going with IBM. Then Microsoft replaced them in that saying. Now, Google does seem much more likely to be the replacement in that phrase than Apple: much of their products are business focused and they personify the mythical central computer I heard about as early as 1977 that knows all about everyone. On the other hand, Apple does seem much more experienced at deliberate evil e.g. drm at iTunes.

Maybe we will get some market diversity at long last in that they will both be 800lb gorillas.