I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)

There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind.

Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.

The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.

I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.

Since some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one.

Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.

This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!

I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)

I remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today.

I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.

I would argue that Microsoft had a solid run for some years in the middle where their software was pretty good quality. I think it started with Windows 2000 and certainly lasted through the XP era. Windows 7 was pretty decent too. Their operating system was straight up trash before win2k and has been in steady decline for some years now. It doesn't surprise me that younger people are only now (re-)discovering that Microsoft operating systems are bad.

> Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.

I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.

If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.

(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)

counterpoint: in my experience, the low level Windows OS primitives are less buggy than low level MacOS primitives.

They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS.

But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.

Windows 2000,XP,7 may not have been perfect, but they were leagues better than the state of the art today.

That isn't true. Microsoft has made some genuinely good software over the years.

microslop before invention of slop