Comment by ok123456

We don't have to guess about what was going on at Microsoft in those days. From "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates":

The day the Mac shipped in January 1984, Gates told McGregor to run out and buy a Mac for the Windows developers.

"Reverse engineer it," Gates told him. "I have applications like BASIC and Multiplan that we've hacked out for the Mac, and we're working on other Mac applications like Word with a graphical user interface. I want to run all those Mac applications on Windows." Apparently, Gates didn't see a conflict of interest with this strategy.

...

"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together."