Even when it first became a meme, I realized that "developers, developers, developers" was not just a chant or a slogan but an integral part of Microsoft's platform strategy. Get third-party developers on board, lock 'em in, convince them that it was worth their while to build on and for Windows specifically. The mire developers loved and wrote fir Windows, the more valuable Windiws became and the stronger Microsoft's positi(n was. Every release of the MSDN library had a new API to get excited about. Keep iterating on their development tools, culminating in Visual Studio, which trammelled everything else in the marketplace. Even John Carmack, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall thought Microsoft's platform was pretty much best of breed. To this day the debugging situation on Linux is still stone knives and bearskins compared to what VS offers.
It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
Yes, Visual Studio 6 was a mind-expanding experience. Nothing else came close until I tried IntelliJ a decade later, and even that is still missing a ton of advanced features.
Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.
It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.