Standards have everything to do with it. With closed formats and APIs not ISO recognised or approved open formats it is almost impossible to produce an IT product that is compatible with MS software without their approval, which is anti competitive which is why they were fined last year $1.4 bn by the EU and are now under further investigation.
That wasn't about standards. That started with Novell whinging about how they couldn't compete in the server market because MS wouldn't let them use some of their *private* API calls. It then snowballed into this bizarre thing about releasing a version of Windows without Windows Media Player. Hardly tricky to workaround given that you just need to install Winamp, RealPlayer, Quicktime or whatever else you want.
The current EU investigation is about being able to disable IE and for other browsers to be used. Right now it's possible to use whatever browser you like (all you have to do is install it) and this has absolutely no bearing on standards or document formats either.
The anti-competitive thing is interesting. In any other industry doing something well and capturing top market share is considered good. Keeping your trade secrets and other proprietary information to yourself is fundamental to this. Do it too well, or just have little/crap opposition and you're punished.
In software people get annoyed that one company has cornered the market and tell them to spill the beans (which would, eventually, be cause the downfall of the company) or impose punitive fines which serve no purpose except eat into shareholders
1 money, halt any fall in software prices and the make boat loads for the EU (what they did with it I have no idea. Anyone?).
Maybe Microsoft failed by just not being just a little bit crap. Maybe they should have let Lotus carry on flogging SmartSuite and let it keep a 10% market share. I dunno.
Document formats and Web standards are the obvious ones but there are others. The problem for MS is having tried to block competitors unfairly the quality of the opposition needs to be better and is gaining ground, such as Apache, by far the biggest server and running non MS software, Firefox, now with 20% of the browser market,
How exactly are MS "blocking" Apache, Mozilla and the like?
Open Office is making inroads into Government, Education and SOHO where the realisation that archived documents may well end up being irretrievable because of closed document formats. MS's biggest competitors IBM, Sun and Novell are spending millions developing Open Office for the corporate desktop and then there is the biggest threat of all Google and cloud computing although personally I think they will struggle with that.
Word/Excel/etc document formats will never be lost. The majority has already been reverse engineered. I'll bet within 3 years MS will release a free converter from their proprietary format to some open format, but it won't change much because the majority will continue to use the proprietary format, just as they always have. It's much harder to change user behaviour.
Millions is peanuts in this industry. Anyone can bundle up OpenOffice with a few other bits of software to follow the crowd and look like they're doing their part. IBM/Sun/Novell don't really care about OpenOffice because they can't make any real money out of it.
As each day passes MSFT, Novell, Sun and IBM become less competitive with each other. They're all settling for their little (or should I say huge) niches and avoiding conflict where possible. Novell is starting to smell odd. IBM and Sun don't have a viable OS for x86. MSFT isn't interested in Sparc or Power6. Competition means more platforms to support, more software and more problems.
I am not bashing MS just stating the facts they will probably be a good study case for business schools in the future of how not to retain market share just like the previous giant to fall IBM who thought there was no future for the desktop PC.
IBM got out of the hardware game a while back when it spun off the PC/laptop stuff to Lenovo. It kept various bits (AIX boxes, AS/400 and mainframe stuff). But now the company is a partly a software company, but primarily a services and consulting company.
I'd be hard pushed to describe IBM as "fallen" given that it posted strong 2008 financial results (unlike almost every other sector during the beginning of the recession) and had a total revenue greater than that of Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and Google combined.
1. I'm not an MSFT shareholder but I may have some connection to big blue...
[EDIT] I'm not knocking OpenOffice's efforts at all. I use it, plus some other Open tools like OpenProj. But it is never going to take hold whilst MS is around, and forcing MS out is definitely cutting off the nose to spite the face.