>>None of that has anything to do with "wrath" of MS.
The 'wrath' of any company is one juggernaut leader at the top. Apple's 'wrath' was Steve Jobs and Microsoft's 'wrath' was/is Bill Gates.
As much as we like to state it otherwise, Bill Gates was ruthless at execution, and he was workaholic with no parallel. People aren't exactly replaceable, and by that definition what they bring to the table.
Lotus notes: some good ideas but horrible outdated app
wordperfect/wordstar: not even close to matching MS Word's feature or ease of use
Novell: what did they make other than networking that ended up being a standard part of all machines and all OSes, not just windows
Lotus 123/Visicalc: did Visicalc ever make it out of text mode? Excel beat those be being a better product.
Borland: also got out competed. Their only product that didn't suck was they're dev products but they couldn't keep up with Visual Studio. They had one database product that took them year to try to update to be competitive and lost their market by taking too long.
None of that has anything to do with "wrath" of MS.