Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. Look at WinRar or the thousands of other small companies who made a living selling SW for Windows without paying Microsoft a cent.

>The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day.

UX is subjective and debatable. And there's a difference between one having poor UX, and one being "mean spirited towards users".

Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.

App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.

    > Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. 

But did Microsoft take their money like Apple does today?

The internet and shareware distributions was also a thing back then, where you get the SW for free from anywhere, and send a payment to the developer and received an activation key over the phone/post.

Something that is a surefire success in one platform is not necessarily a surefire success in another. Which is why saying in hindsight "this is monopolistic behavior!" is such a silly thing to do.

If I'm not mistaken you also had to pay to redistribute or link to system libraries so yeah, you had to pay a pretty penny to play.