and the company has driven innovation for decades
Uh... geez. Where to even start?
The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others. Even MS-DOS started out as a bought-out CP/M imitation.
...
MS has always been a follower at best. It has frequently been a predatory abuser of its monopoly. It has usually parasitized on the innovations of others. Embrace, extend, extinguish was always how they operated. It has never been an innovation leader.
Actually, Microsoft did pioneer one major innovation, one which has driven most of the software industry for decades. And that's their development/business model.
Before the MS era, large-scale commercial software was expensive. And it was expensive because it was written according to rigorous processes. Writing software is easy. Writing stable and reliable software is hard, because most of the effort goes into the comprehensive design, verification, and QA that's necessary to make it truly reliable. And that costs money, which has to get passed on to the customer.
Microsoft's great innovation was to realize that, rather than spend a small fortune buying 99.99999% reliable software, most people would rather pay a fraction of that amount for 98% reliable software. It's that last 1-2% of quality control that costs most of the time and money in development. So Microsoft decided to shortcut it and sell cheap software to the masses. And people demonstrated that yes, rather than spend $1000 on an application that never crashes, they'd prefer to spend $100 on an application that crashes sometimes but can get the job done if they're careful to save early & often.
We don't have to like it, but this was an major innovation, and it did shape the computer industry for decades. Innovative doesn't necessarily mean good.
