One may see them as a good "driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software" for a very limited time. I don't know if the result of 90's and early 2000's microsoft was a net positive to the field.
I don't think "They have done more to educate people in developing countries [..] than maybe any other company in history" considering how they also made many governments, institutions and people dependent on their software. This eventually cost these same entities a lot more than needed if there was a healthy competition which always fought against.
Done charity work there.
Created an IT company there.
You have it totally backward.
IT is NOT helping the poorest part of Africa. Quite the opposite.
But it does help us create a lot of BS virtue signaling about all the good we do in Africa.
The explanation would take a lot of text, unfortunately and I'm not in the mood for the rant again. But it comes from experience, not from the idealized narrative you have been sold.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
People in developing countries chose to pirate and use Windows because it ran most of the important apps of the era, namely video games, which were also easy to pirate, and because it ran on any custom built PC from the parts each user could afford to scrap together. It was the perfect storm.