I have to disagree with the statement that Gates has done so much to hold back software. Some of the best minds in computing still are @ Microsoft Research. MSFT pours billions into basic and applied computer science research. If you say that Gates is very much responsible for the stagnation of software development, than you could blame Jobs just as much if not more b/c Jobs was the one who led the charge in making computing a pop culture when he saw the Xerox PC, decided to build the Mac, but missed some of the really cool ideas behind it.
Under Gate's control, Microsoft destroyed Netscape as well as BeOS. Netscape was, in the mid 1990's, attempting to create the "browser OS" that we're finally beginning to see today. Had they not been driven out of business, we would quite possibly have been 5-10 years earlier in seeing the web-based products that we're finally seeing today. Microsoft didn't want to have to deal with the decoupling of office suites from the OS (that would be the two legs that the MS monopoly stands on, after all), so they needed to ensure that web-based office suites couldn't happen.
BeOS was just plain an awesome OS. Its networking was a joke, but the scheduler was awe-inspiring, and the default programming model of tons-o-threads would have produced a generation of programmers ready to handle today's multi-core reality. Had users had the choice between windows 98 and BeOS, with decent application and vendor support for both, there would have been no contest. Win98 was a joke, and Be was amazingly smooth and nice to use. MS destroyed Be by forcing OEMs to choose between being Be partners and being MS ones. Not a hard choice for the OEMs to make, unfortunately...
It was Bill that destroyed those companies. It was Bill that set back both the web and desktop OS development by years. Who else has done that much damage to the software industry?
Microsoft did not destroy Be, its own incompetent management did (with a bit of assistance from AT&T when it decided to discontinue the Hobbit chip.) Be first tried to create a new hardware platform, then tried to be an alternative OS for mac hardware, and finally headed towards the wintel world. By this point it was far too late. Given the space left for growth in the x86 line there was no need for multi-core in the late 90s and the cost of going to a bigger chip was far less than the cost of adding all of the additional motherboard support for lashing together multiple copies of last years CPU.
o Netscape Sold for a negotiated $4 Billion, and on it's final day of trading was worth $10 Billion. Microsoft may have (illegally as it turns out) wiped out the Netscape Browser as a profitable product for Netscape, but they hardly _destroyed_ Netscape.
o BeOS? Good Lord, if anything Microsoft would have _funded_ BeOS if only to create the illusion of there being competition in the OS market. BeOS collapsed when Jean-Louis Gassée was unable to close a deal with Apple. There really was no market for a Fourth major platform (Mac, Linux and Microsoft being the other three floating around in 1996/1997). Having a delightfully smooth OS doesn't really mean a lot if there are no applications for the platform - and, for better or worse, Microsoft had/has a vast array of developers and applications.
One, your are right, Jobs and Apple as a whole inherently understand how to make technology human and accessible to the average person. This is clear from their history of products and product marketing.
Two, surely the dominant Windows platform created opportunities for many software developers. One could develop and launch for Windows and have access to hundreds of millions of potential customers. Didn't a de facto standard platform allow people to think more about applications and what computers could be used for instead of particulars of the operating system? That said, Windows dominance surely held back operating system technology, but standardization had some value, right?
