Completely agree. People hate Gates and Microsoft for some really silly reasons.
Windows 95? It was a brave and revolutionary OS. Would world switch to Linux, Mac or BeOS if there was no Win95? No way it would, it would wait for Windows 4.
Internet Explorer 6? Great, great browser by the time it was released. Really, whoever calls that 'crap, uninnovative software' wasn't there in 2001.
Office? By far the best office software suite out there.
Windows XP? People use it to this day and are so happy about it they don't want to change if for newer and better systems.
Of course there were things that MS did wrong (especially on the business side of things) but the whole hatred thing is, in my opinion, more like a kind of pop-culture than something based on facts. Just look at Xbox360 - it only took to not advertise it as a Microsoft creation and kids who ridicule Windows on a day-to-day basis are now "Halo fanboys".
As for the Jobs quotes - if these were taken as some kind of a gospel or a road sign we all should hate Android by now. Actually, it amazes me that Jobs is so glorified here, while Gates always gets the flack - after all the word "hacker" suits the latter a lot more.
MS has terrible taste (as Jobs famously pointed out), and a lot of people hate companies with a bad sense of fashion and taste. That's a big reason why people hate walmart, I expect.
MS has been a bully and has used its size to gain an unfair advantage from time to time. However, in general I'd say that MS is actually less guilty of this sort of thing than the average run-of-the-mill company of a similar size. Compare and contrast with, say, AEG, Bank of America, or Archer-Daniels-Midland for example. On a properly calibrated evil-o-meter MS hardly registers.
Finally, it's easy to develop a strong mental picture of a hypothetical "better" world, even if that world is wholly impractical. There are fundamental reasons why linux, to this day, is still not the best choice for the average consumer desktop. Even down to a fundamental technological design level there are good reasons why that's so (though there's also android, which still has a delicious linux core). The truth is that "the man" hasn't been holding back electric car technology, solar power, and linux on the desktop merely to prop up big oil and Microsoft. Sometimes it takes time for competing technologies to mature to a level to where they are actually competitive. Linux has done awesomely in the server market, for example, even despite MS's massive expenditures to make substantial inroads.
You've offered no proof or even speculation people wouldn't switch if 95 didn't exist. OS/2 Warp was a modest hit the same year and was advocated by technical people for years. It was much more solid yet still user friendly. There were other decent choices as we've mentioned.
I like XP and still use it, but it doesn't fit into the thread about MS halting innovation during the 90's.
Of course there were things that MS did wrong (especially on the business side of things) but the whole hatred thing is, in my opinion, more like a kind of pop-culture than something based on facts. Just look at Xbox360 - it only took to not advertise it as a Microsoft creation and kids who ridicule Windows on a day-to-day basis are now "Halo fanboys".
As for the Jobs quotes - if these were taken as some kind of a gospel or a road sign we all should hate Android by now. Actually, it amazes me that Jobs is so glorified here, while Gates always gets the flack - after all the word "hacker" suits the latter a lot more.