Hmm, ok, I may be wrong about the Lotus one - checking again there are a few quotes about Microsoft attacking it, but no proof that I can see. They still have an awful lot of cases though showing them doing whatever it took to beat the competition - legal or otherwise.
And regarding Stacker, Stacker was a one trick pony, but what do you expect when your highly successful program is ripped off by the dominant OS vendor? The wind was knocked out of the company at the height of their success, and despite their program being massively better than doublespace, nobody was going to buy it when a 'good enough' equivalent was being given away for free.
I was a big user of Stacker at the time, but eventually had to stop using it as there were no new versions coming out, but doublespace corrupted my data so many times I couldn't use that either. End results - as a user I lost the ability to compress my data.
Making $5.50 for every copy of DOS that was sold wasn't a good thing for the user - Stacker still had no control over the software, no means of releasing updates, and essentially killed the company.
Winternals may be updated regularly, but try to find Winternals Protection Manager. That was a cracking product, launched 2-3 months before Microsoft bought the company, and which hasn't been seen in over 2 years.
Protection Manager was a way to massively increase the security of XP, running any program as a restricted user, with network admins able to grant higher permissions to only those programs that need them. Think Vista's UAE, but for XP, and perfect for network administrators. Unfortunately, that would have slowed adoption of Vista, and allowed corporates to roll Protection Manager out en mass on their Windows XP installations, so there's been no sign of the program since Microsoft bought the company.
And as to the rest: I don't mind having a browser in my OS, I just object to Microsoft stifling innovation to do it, and as a network manager, IE is an absolute nightmare when it comes to security. It's done far more harm than good having that included by default.
I've spent the last 8 years fire-fighting security issues caused by IE. They created a browser you can't remove, allowed it to run scripts, and granted it huge amounts of access to the OS. And the only reason it was coupled so tightly with Windows was because Microsoft knew that what they were doing was anti-competitive behaviour and wanted to claim it was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.
So great, 8 years of security headaches because Microsoft didn't care about the law and wanted to muscle in on the browser market. Damn right I have an axe to grind.