How Windows came to dominance is much like how VHS beat out Beta for the video tape format in the 1980s. While Sony's Beta was technologically superior to JVC's VHS format, JVC chose to license the use of this to all comers. Sony decided to keep Beta proprietary. While VHS machines proliferated and dropped in price, Sony Beta machine stayed expensive and rare.
Microsoft used the same open license strategy, while rival operating systems like OS2 and Apple stayed proprietary. Windows machines proliferated and dropped in price and Windows came to dominate the market. Upstarts like Linux have little chance of supplanting Windows despite Windows' flaws, because the switching cost for businesses currently using Windows would be too high for the benefit gained by using some other operating system.
What killed Beta was that you couldn't record an entire movie on it. VHS would let you and won out.
Beta was licensed. I have an old Sanyo beta VCR that still works.
The real reason was that VHS offered 2 hour tapes while Beta was still only 90 minutes. When tapes cost $20 each, that was a huge difference.
You mix Apple with .. umm... oranges. It was not Microsoft but IBM that licensed out it's architecture. Other companies were then able to manufacture "IBM clones" at a cheaper cost. That was bad news for Apple but for IBM as well, because even though IBM's propriatory MicroChannel Architecture was superior to PCI, it cost more at the counter, much like the MacIntosh. Consumers, in all their wisdom, went with the cheaper machines. Software market followed the consumers and their PCs, making it slim pickins for Apple enthusiasts.
Microsoft's role was something else entirely. Initially, IBM had a machine but no operating system to run on it. Microsoft delivered one "cleverly" named DOS. Even better, MS somehow managed to retain the copyrights. That enabled them to sell the same OS to other PC manufacturers. Which they did in a most unprecidented way. MS offered it's OS to manufacturers at bargain prices with the following catch: MS got paid based not on the number of it's OSs that shipped, but on the number of computers that shipped. In other words, a person buying a PC clone could [seemingly] get Windows for a song but would have to pay "extra" for a copy of IBM's OS/2. So, despite OS/2's superior multitasking and scripting abilities, it failed due in large to a stacking of the deck.
Upstarts like Linux have little chance of supplanting Windows despite Windows' flaws, because the switching cost for businesses currently using Windows would be too high for the benefit gained by using some other operating system.
Nevertheless, Linux is finding its way into corporate America and this is a trend that appears to be growing. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.