At its peak Windows was running on 90% of computers and the biggest rival Apple (Steve Jobs) was taking money from Microsoft (Bill G) to survive.
Bill was able to leverage almost all other software companies to create software for Windows to create a lock in fro the customers.
> The day before the announcement Apple had a market cap of $2.46 billion,[58] and had ended its previous quarter with quarterly revenues of US$1.7 billion and cash reserves of US$1.2 billion,[59] making the US$150 million amount of the investment largely symbolic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1996:_Ret...
It's hard to see how many people suffered who didn't fail thanks mainly to their own mistakes. I'd put DR, IBM (Lotus), Novell and Netscape in that group.