They also leveraged their relationship with Intel to the max - Wintel was a phrase for a reason. Companies like Apple faltered, in part, in the 90's because of hardware disadvantages.
Often their competitors had superior products - but MS still won through - in part helped by their ruthlessly leveraging of synergies across their platforms. ( though as new platforms emerged the desire to maximise synergies across platforms eventually held them back).
That aggressive, Windows everywhere behaviour, is what united it's competitors around things like Java, then Linux and open source in general which stopped MS's march into the data centre, and got regulators involved when they tried to strangle the web.
It showed
CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge distraction and prevented the app platform from being good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on Silverlight for a bit back then.
IMHO the reason for Microsoft's failed phone venture was moving onto the windows kernel and 2xing system requirements.
Phone hardware was exploding in capability at the time and the right thing was to lean into that and offer the same developer experience as on desktops with the same OS kernel, like Apple did from the beginning with Darwin and Android with Linux. Microsoft only realized too late.
You have got to be kidding. The 90s was my heyday, and Microsoft documentation was extravagantly unhelpful, always.
One of my internships was at a company writing an example app for SQL server offline replication. Taking a DB that had changed while offline and syncing them to a master DB when reconnection happened. (Back in 2004 or so, now days this is an easier thing).
The company I interned at was hired by MSFT to write a sample app for Fabrikam Fine Furniture that did the following:
1. Sales people on the floor could draw a floorplan on a tablet PC of a desired sectional couch layout and the pieces would be identified and the order automatically made up .
2. Customer enters their delivery info on the tablet.
3. DB replicated down to the delivery driver's tablet PC when the driver next pulls into the loading bay with all the order info.
4. After the delivery is finished and signed for on the tablet PC, the customer's signature is digitally signed so it cannot be tampered with later.
5. When the delivery truck pulls back into the depot, SQL server replication happens again, syncing state changes from the driver back to the master DB.
That is an insane sample app, just one of countless thousands that Microsoft shipped out. Compare that to the bare bones hello world samples you get now days.