Bill gates went against the grain when he decided to let EVERYBODY (all hardware vendors) in on licensing Windows. That was contrary to known industry practice at the time - Apple's MacOS and IBMs various proprietary OSes being the 'trend'.
On the other hand - when one looks at applications that run ON windows - Microsoft has done its best to keep these proprietary - in the sense - that they only want them to run on Windows (run well anyway). Take the latest example of the .NET framework - which is the most powerful application runtime out there. In theory - one could have the .NET runtime on Linux (Mono) - as well as other OSes - however - no one believes that these will be even a shadow of what .NET can do on Windows.
Sun and IBM and all the other java hawks - have taken the exact opposite industry approach. They have opened up their SOFTWARE (J2EE app servers etc.) to everyone - whereas they have kept their OSes glued to their hardware.
My key point here is that a company needs to know WHAT to protect - and what to open to the entire industry.
Sun opened up its core programming language and runtime environment (java) to the world - whereas Microsoft kept most of its core programming languages and runtimes proprietary.
In my opinion - Gates got it right BOTH times (with licensing the OS to all hardware vendors - and keeping software that runs on OS closed to competition). Also - in my opinion - the rest of the industry (Sun, IBM included) got it WRONG both times!
While I wanted to conclude with 'History will show....' - I think history has ALREADY shown who the winner of the OS wars is. And with Java losing more and more marketshare to Microsoft's .NET - I believe history will be on Mr. Gates' side once again.
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