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You could use their free crappy media player, or you could use Zoom for free

You could use their free buggy internet explorer, or you could use firefox for free

you could use their free zip utility or use ultimate zip for free
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Which of course Microsoft did to itself. But along the way it put some pretty good companies out of business, and no one could replace them and make a profit. PCTools made a very nice set of system tools. I'd love to know what they would be putting out today if Microsoft hadn't crushed them. Instead we ended up with a crappy defragmenter, "folders" that you can't filter, and freaking searches that take hours as you gaze at some stupid dog.
Plus you can't directly edit your disk, and you can't recover data.

ProComm has some nice communication software at the time, OK, time may have passed them by either way. Anyway, they, and anybody else putting out communication software got squashed. Netware? flattened. Stacker? pirated (Yo-ho BillG, that's what you did).

M$ made it so that the only model that would work is free software. It's the only thing their "bundling" scheme of marketing can't compete against. It is kind of ironic that M$ was so successful at stomping out legitimate proprietary competition that it created its own Frankenstein monster.