I think the selection bias is 1980s companies because that was the context. (Linux is 1991, Java 1995, Google 1998, etc)

From the 1980s, the major software companies that's still alive today, you have:

  Intuit (Quicken/TurboTax), 
  Adobe, 
  Computer Associates, 
  Autodesk

Adobe and Autodesk survived because Microsoft never entered the professional graphics editing market of Photoshop and CAD drafting. If Microsoft did try to compete, they still might have lost to Adobe and Autodesk but it sure helps when Microsoft ignores that market. (Microsoft sort of had a competing edocument standard of XPS to Adobe's PDF but that initiative didn't seem to have all of MS's attention behind it.)

Computer Associates (now CA Technologies) was this weird corporation that basically did a bunch of acquisitions of forgettable companies. I can't think of an instance where CA and Microsoft competed head-to-head. CA bought a database programming 4GL (Nantucket Clipper) in 1992 but the DOS based programming languages were already starting to die by then so MS Visual Basic for Windows didn't really compete fiercely with it.

Most of 1980s companies didn't survive, whether they competed with Microsoft or not. Microsoft did, but that doesn't mean it killed every other company that didn't.

But Microsoft competed with Apple, and Apple didn't die. Xenix - Microsoft's UNIX offering - went nowhere (though it wasn't even MS product, technically), and other Unixes still alive. In DOS times, there were pretty successful competitors to MS-DOS (of course, those died when DOS computing died, but I'm not sure this qualifies as direct competition).

It was a scavenger that extracted the remaining value from failing and failed companies.

I'm not saying it was bad for the ecosystem ;-)

>> MSIE? Dominates the world.

IE did dominate the world. Remember Netscape? IE was at like 90% in the early 2000's until Firefox showed up.

>> Java? Completely unknown

Never made much of an impact on the desktop. What's the most widely used Java desktop app? Was there ever one? Eclipse/Netbeans comes to mind.

For a brief period. So did many other short-term phenomena, from BASIC to MS Access to Clipper to Pacman. And now they are stuff for the museums. Except for Pacman, of course.

> Never made much of an impact on the desktop

So? It still survived competition with Microsoft - and, arguably, won on every platform except Windows, non-Windows .net use is still basically zero and Linux rules server world, so...

> What's the most widely used Java desktop app?

I honestly have no idea. Well, Eclipse of course, IntelliJ suite of tools, probably, but it could be some other apps are Java too and I just don't know it. The point is Java is alive and well despite competition from mighty invincible Microsoft.

Ironic, because these are just Java IDEs.