An old story and few snaps

 Microsoft Xenix OS, an operating system for 16-bit computers, based on the  BSD 4.1. It was on 1976, when there was no Linus or Linux. It is really funny to, when we compare the current price of Windows 7 Pro or Apple Mac Leopard 5.6 with the price of a Microsoft OS In 1976, In 1976 the cost of Operating system  from Microsoft was $1000 to $7500 for educational institutions and from $5000 to $40,000 for full commercial open source (per CPU). On 1981, the IBM 5150 Personal Computer gained popularity.

Then, on 1984, the Apple Macintosh Released - Apple Computer- In 1980, ten years before (there was no known Linus or Linux),  Microsoft announced XENIX OS Microsoft port of Unix for various 16-bit microprocessors,

and the story continues , only an year later, in 1981 Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS and "IBM Personal Computer DOS 1.0" was ready for the introduction of the IBM PC in October 1981, during this period development of XENIX and DOS was in parallel and XENIX greatly influenced DOS design.For six years (from 1984 till 1990) Microsoft was one of the leading Unix vendors, the provider of the  first cheap large volume commercial Unix and, simultaneously, owner of a major branch of Unix  -- Xenix

When we analyze MS was trying to bring all known and powerful features of XENIX in to DOS and they have announced all XENIX features for upcoming versions of DOS. That shows that Microsoft certainly tried to bring UNIX features to DOS,  but the forks, multitasking, and multi-user support never materialized. Till 1980s  Microsoft was used XENIX for  Internet gateways, running Sendmail and they functioned as internal gateways between MSMail and Exchange while the company converted everyone over to having personal mailboxes on an Exchange server. In 1996 completely removed XENIX internal network ( Microsoft's Local Area Network (MILAN) was on XENIX during that time).

 The important fact that MS was essentially a software company with Vision  can controls and extends the PC hardware standard without the Microsoft Vision in PC hardware standard there can be no any substantial base for Linux at all because price of hardware is discounted due to the volume of Microsoft software sells.  In this sense Linux is a side effect of Microsoft dominance.