Comment by xenadu02

I understand the quote and 100% believe that some people within MS wanted it purely to prevent competition. But clearly someone with a cooler head looked at it and made the call not to enable it. That's the only thing that actually matters.

I get what you are saying about Dr DOS and the OEMs but it was a battle already lost - Windows 3.x was a massive blockbuster for MS. I suspect that was part of the internal argument for not shipping the AARD code: it was a liability for a battle already won. Windows 95 started development in 1992 and was intended from the start to be a single OS without requiring a separate DOS.

Not to say Microsoft didn't do bad things. The OEM licensing terms were abusive in my opinion... why not focus on that instead of some AARD code that was never enabled and wouldn't have mattered even if it was?