Comment by madrox

As much as I'd like to give Microsoft credit for this, I don't think they deserve it. There's multiple historical writeups documenting how management had written off Windows as a gaming platform and did not support the original DirectX project. If it weren't for the tenacity of the original three DirectX engineers who basically did this as a passionate side project the gaming landscape would look a lot different. Microsoft got this monopoly somewhat in spite of itself.