You have to draw a distinction between what IBM did as a response to competition in our actual history and what IBM would have done had Microsoft never existed. IBM would have almost certainly continued what it had done before and what virtually every other company was doing at the time: offering bundled hardware/software solutions, using customer lock-in and FUD like weapons, and pushing incredibly high profit markups on everything. It's certainly the same thing Apple did. And it's the same road that smartphones have for the most part taken up until very recently. It's easy to skip past the fact that Microsoft had a pretty significant impact on the structure of the entire computing industry and some of that impact was very positive. Granted, they certainly have their fair share of sins to atone for but in my judgment any of their likely replacements from the early era of personal computing would have had as many or more.

Hardly. I was a part of the developer program, and for the time, it was a dream to develop for. Because of the pervasive multithreading, development was a little bit more complicated, but the BeAPI was lovely, and very forward-thinking. And the benefits of the multithreaded architecture were immediately apparent to anyone who did even elementary development.

What killed BeOS was Microsoft strong-arming PC manufacturers to not allow BeOS as an option. Be had Hitachi and Compaq lined up for dual booting and an internet appliance, respectively. Microsoft used their OEM program to get them to go back on the deals.

BeOS alone is one reason I will never forgive the anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics of 90's Microsoft.

Be (the company) offered to give BeOS away for free to any OEM, but none would touch it... because the contracts with Microsoft at the time meant they had to pay a Windows license for every machine sold, even if BeOS and (not Windows) was installed on it.

It wasn't a good time to compete with Microsoft.