>>This is definitely true. Companies don't want to make their products too compatible with MS technologies because they don't want to help MS. On the other hand, MS is the standard and if you don't support standards and can't make your own, you're toast. Of course, MS has the advantage of owning the standards. If they're trying to enhance a product and run into a bug in OLE, they can just fix it. They also have advance knowledge of where these standards are going.
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>The benefits of being a front-runner, leader, or whatever you want to call it, is being able to define or set the standards. :)

That's one way to look at it. The Justice Department might argue that leveraging a legally obtained monopoly in one area (say desktop OS software) to gain a monopoly in another area (say desktop application software) is a violation of US anti-trust laws. If I remember correctly, part of Microsoft's consent decree with DoJ dealt with undocumented, unsupported Windows features that MS claimed developers shouldn't be using while MS developers had used them in Office applications.

I'm getting way, way, out of my area of expertise now, so I'll quit before I say something really stupid (if I haven't already).