Well, MS behaves like any large corporation in a dominant market position, set your expectations accordingly. As an end user, I don't care if MS charges camera manufacturers for technology licensing. There is so much of that going on everywhere. I care about the bottom line - the camera pricetag.
Some good comments by Jeff Schewe and others in the thread Steve linked to above.
I have to disagree with Thomas' comment in that thread though, WIC itself isn't useless (I have used it experimentally myself to do raw conversion in my software), rather Thomas wanted a cross platform solution to raw processing and wanted independence from the camera manufacturers. By cutting the band to the camera manufacturer he ended up with Adobe's raw conversion screwing up the colors in our photos for years. Now finally Adobe is working on a "profile" solution to patch up the problem. Had Adobe not gone their own way but instead decided to work with the camera manufacturers (through WIC or other interface) we would have had good color in Adobe's products from day one.
But it's a bit of a chicken/egg scenario - without Adobe using WIC there is less pressure for WIC to evolve, and the interest in providing good codecs is moderate at best. And without good codecs available, who wants to build WIC-compatible software? I don't, not for now at least. So in the end, where MS screwed up with WIC is on the market alliance side - had MS acted humbly and worked with software vendors like Adobe and others to ensure that WIC met vendors' needs then perhaps things would have looked differently today.
Instead, the situation we have now means that every time a new camera comes out, all raw developer makers have to update their softwares to support the new camera models - not only format, mind you, but also color interpretation. This makes it almost impossible for a small software maker like myself to compete in raw conversion. We went through this at Light Crafts, renting cameras and profiling, and releasing a patch for every new camera model. Believe me, it's a royal PITA. Had there instead been a good and popular codec platform, then making a raw developer module would have been a walk in the park.
So MS approach with WIC failed mostly because MS provided an open platform for others to use but failed to make it popular among software makers.
Apple's approach OTOH is a bit of the opposite. Apple likes to stay in control, provide a closed system so it can control all aspects of the user experience. This means Apple has to invest more in updates to its software platform. The outcome is clear though - built-in support for raw format is better in OSX than in Windows.
So in the end (so far), the Apple's closed platform approach provides a better value for the end users than MS open platform. Draw your own political analogies hehe