Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund.
It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.)
Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something.
So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.
You just reminded me about how IE was designed to prevent the internet from growing. What a wart of a company. Held back the software world for 20 years.
Even extreme IE bugginess was to try to defend their installed-app business.
Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.