hedwards: Windows was going to be a major player in computer gaming regardless of what they did. There was no need for them to create a Windows only API other than shutting people out.
There was no need to create a cross-platform API when the goal of that API was to make their operating system better and more attractive and that's just what you can expect from
any company. And it's not like the graphics accelerator companies or soundcard manufacturers had worked out a common standard and created cross-platform APIs and then DirectX came along and destroyed all that. If DirectX hadn't come along there would have been as many proprietary APIs as there were manufacturers (like it was with Glide, EAX and many APIs you don't even know because the manufacturers were unsuccessful), eventually several companies would have taken the lead (as they did) and there would have been several proprietary APIs to choose from, none of which would have been supported by all games, and which would have been bound to hardware rather than an operating system and some manufacturers would have only supported the MS OSes anyway because of the overwhelming market share of Windows. Seriously, it's just companies being companies. Creating your own proprietary APIs for your own proprietary OSes or hardware is just how companies operated back then and mostly continue to operate to this day (PhysX, anyone?). And again, DirectX didn't shut anyone out, if a developer wanted to support a different OS, they could, if a hardware manufacturer wanted to use ther own API, they could, DirectX or not (like it was in case of Voodoo who during the Direct3D era had their own API which was cross-platform - and tell me, why had they not gone for an open API that anyone could use? why is only MS the bad guy in this?). There was just no need to create a cross-platform API for MS other than some abstract ideological causes nobody gave a rat's ass about back then. But for the consumer, game developers and in some sense even the hardware manufacturers DirectX was actually beneficial, cross-platform or not. If DirectX hadn't appearend and enforced a standard the success of the different hardware and APIs would have been almost completely based on who could make the better deals rather than the quality of the product, and that would have been absolutely awful.
hedwards: Believe what you like, but the company has a long history of cheating, lieing and tax fraud that put them where they're at today.
Yes they have, nobody's denying that, but that they have done a lot of shit doesn't mean that anything the company has ever done falls into this pattern by default. Whether it's people or companies, you can't just always presume that everything they have done was entirely driven by bad intentions just because that had happened before.