Maybe better for your bottom line (no criticism, we all have to eat), but not better for the world. Look around at our software universe: bad code that shipped, everywhere.
Bad code that ships gets us Windows.
as much as an enthusiast linux user I am, I'm pretty sure that the world would be a worse place without DOS & Windows
Most of their competitors were tied to hardware, and received a lot of their revenue and profit from the combination of hardware and software sales. MS only needed to sell the software, and let HP, Dell, Gateway, and others compete on hardware prices. This probably put more computers out there (within that time span) than would have been achieved without them.
Also they kept at "computers accessible to everyone", and as much as they fought competition, I have to admit they did it.
I've occasionally seen speculation that in the absence of the de-facto DOS monoculture that deal created, CP/M may have been the most likely desktop platform winner, at least initially.
When you work on code long enough two things will eventually happen:
Shippable Bad code will eventually be unshippable.
Unshippable Good code will eventually be shippable.
Bad code gets us the most used, most popular desktop (and maybe server, definitely server for certain industries) operating system in the world? Mac is great, I have one, but Apple made it's cash stores on the back of the iPhone, not MacOS.
The engineering decisions made are often terrible, including recycling the legacy of NeXT for what I assume were ego-based reasons...
Nothing in the history of Windows compares to that scale of bad.
Opportunity cost isn't usually considered in terms of a market, it's considered for an organization. If Microsoft hadn't done Windows, could they have done something more successful with the resources? That's pretty hard to imagine. Certainly you can say that Windows was bad for (the rest of) the desktop OS market. But the fact is, no mind control rays were involved. Microsoft created an OS that unlocked enough functionality for the average user, for little enough cost, that Microsoft took over the world. (Yeah, I know, lock-in and monopoly shenanigans. It's true. But none of it would have mattered if the OS were not good enough to mostly work for most people.)
I can't believe I'm being an apologist for Windows. Gack.