Microsoft's developer experience was great. MSDN CDs were full of valuable info, utilities, and pre-release APIs you won't find elsewhere. MS Visual Studio was (and still is) an exemplar of well-though-out, super-powerful IDE. MS developer docs were pretty thorough.
OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality.
To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive.
Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well.
MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least.
Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.
OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality.
To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive.
Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well.
MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least.
Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.