Interesting comment from Petro in Amiga Future #86

[pwermonger]

I doubt it was directly Amiga that MS even noticed. I recall back in those days MS having a general policy in precventing the companies that got special pricing on the OS from sellign any hardware with another OS. the "stick"they used was that special pricing threatening to pull that meaning the maker would add hundreds to the price of their computers compared to competitors who were still getting the OEM prcing for Windows.
 
Add to that MS not allowing anyone to alter the bootloader in a dual OS system they sold pretty much killed any chance another OS had to gain any percentage of market for a long time.

[pwermonger]

To this day there are still people in the collective Amiga community who believe MS and Apple are "out to get" OS4.

Very true. OS/2 and Linux were the only ones really big enough for MS to notice and these policies MS had in place for OEMs really came from those. They just happened to be a big blanket that Gateway might not have wanted to test. Gateway had to compete price with Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM and a slew of others on their main market.