Bribes are a feature of politically-controlled economies, not a bug.

Thirty years ago when this was all going down, I believed the narratives of the time. Greedy Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pushing IBM's OS/2 out of the consumer market with aggressive DOS and Windows OEM deals.

I mean, they absolutely did do that, but I think the motivation was competitive survival.

The Steve Ballmer interview really shed a lot of light on this, particularly the portion about the IBM and Microsoft OS/2 divorce: https://youtu.be/CYC49_aeop0?t=1476