It was an evolutionary process, largely caused by the blackmailing of Windows license holders, to pre install all MS products, like MS Office and IE. It's called bundling. In the days of the IBM monopoly it was considered illegal, but MS used it to drive Borland and Netscape, and others off the market. Neophytes began using IE instead of Netscape and Office because it came with the box and they didn't know any better. Other competitors were swallowed up by acquisition and just disappered. Sun fought back when JAVA licensing agreements were violated. MS has been a bad actor from the very beginning of personal computer technology development.
One other thing, MS never improved DOS until DR DOS became available, a far more utilitarian system, at which time they began to improve the DOS product.
I have never used IE, never will....never used MS Office..never will...always been Netscape, Corel(Wordperfect ,Borland) user.
..ben there, done that.
One of my pet peeves as well, MSDOS was probably the most reliable,efficiant and stable thing Microsoft ever created and they killed it.Is DR DOS or PC DOS still around?