I think the expectation of software quality in consumers has completely evaporated, and so people expect appallingly bad software and think it's normal. This isn't just the case for Microsoft - look at the baby-ification of macOS UI (let's make it like a children's iPad), any Google software offering (very poor performance) and the majority acceptance of web-browser-in-a-window-is-a-desktop-application software development. They accept things like Slack and Teams (awful software) but also put up with Skype getting worse in the decades before.
Office 2003 and prior were quite good, but then people think Google Docs is somehow equivalent to the functionality of Word.
Admittedly, Active Directory was afflicted by impossibly tiny windows for the management tabs, but the functionality worked (and you could write your own extensions to the LDAP tree and COM-based UI interface for them) as proven by the rehashing of part of the functionality into Google's "organisational" offerings (sign into Chrome and receive restrictions from your organisational (company) overlord, the new Group Policy).
It's a real pity. If we showed software today via a time machine to ourselves 25+ years ago, we'd be shocked at how slow and ineffectual it was and deeply distressed that this was the norm worldwide.
Office 2003 and prior were quite good, but then people think Google Docs is somehow equivalent to the functionality of Word.
Admittedly, Active Directory was afflicted by impossibly tiny windows for the management tabs, but the functionality worked (and you could write your own extensions to the LDAP tree and COM-based UI interface for them) as proven by the rehashing of part of the functionality into Google's "organisational" offerings (sign into Chrome and receive restrictions from your organisational (company) overlord, the new Group Policy).
It's a real pity. If we showed software today via a time machine to ourselves 25+ years ago, we'd be shocked at how slow and ineffectual it was and deeply distressed that this was the norm worldwide.