It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. 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.
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.
'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.
I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.
When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.
IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
I encountered bugs when it first released even with a decent PC. IIRC there was a mission where you were running away in a truck, and it would crash every time at a certain point so I could never complete it. Also the whole save file size limit debacle, where they never actually removed deleted items from your inventory and the save file would reach a certain size that the game could no longer read (10mb or something like that)
Cyberpunk was a dumpster fire on release, I'm not joking, you could have two machines seemingly identical but get wildly different performance, it was an absolute mess.
Even to this day after so many patches some bugs still are present.
The PS4 release was notoriously bad because they were reliant on caching from disk, if it's an SSD it's ok, if it's a hard drive, though luck...
This is even worse when you look at all the marketing material leading up to release, if you put that together it's close to fraud in my opinion...
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.)
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.
Can confirm, I ran a server like this at a LAN party once, 90% legitimate players and then a couple who hadn't bought the game. From what I recall they had fun and bought the game later. No auth means someone could put in your name and steal your items, and you probably won't have a (non-default) skin, though I think you can even work around those issues with mods.
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
It isn't if you can afford enough lawyers to make microsoft's legal department blink at the cost of prosecution. If you can't drop $10K+ on a lawyer at the start though I would not put any money on winning.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
I moved to New Zealand from the US recently, and the tech industry here is mostly on .NET and Azure. My coworkers keep looking at me like I'm a moron because I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins and don't know their weird homebrew system to deploy things to our on prem windows servers.
Ignoring anticompetitive behavior, Windows is the only thing that works on most computers and is usable by most people. If you buy a computer, and it's not a MacBook, Windows is the only option.
I'm not convinced this is true in any sense at all anymore. Can you name a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux? I was gonna suggest maybe the surface tablets, but a quick googling suggest even they run it just fine.
20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not like you can install windows on that either, and there are projects with some progress towards running Linux on those too.
I started writing a long rant about my experience with Microsoft accounts, Minecraft and Microsoft Family whatever they call it. Parental controls and stuff. But I think I'll just agree with you. It sucks, it's confusing and is designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then.
I think they just meant that Microsoft owns Minecraft and you need an account with them these days. Java Edition stills runs on GNU/Linux last I checked.
>it's been decade since I played the game
Unfortunately you may have lost access to your account and thus copy of the game if you didn't do the two mandatory time-limited account migrations.
worse than minecraft is minecraft dungeons, there's a bug in the login page that hits the backend more than 100 times if, for some reason, something is incorrect, which will trigger anti-whatevers on your microsoft account, which means you can potentially lose your microsoft account.
I had to, for an hour, go through hoops logging into this microsoft service and update my recovery email so i could log into another service that wanted the recovery email as an auth factor, and even then: it happened again when i wanted to play my character on my switch instead of my PC.
i sincerely doubt i'll pay for minecraft dungeons 2, even though i do like the game, very barebones diablo-feeling.
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.
Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility.
Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
I am skeptical of the “backwards compatibility” claims. Often playing older Windows games is easier and more reliable on Linux with Wine/Proton than on Windows 11.
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.
The Windows updates have become so unreliable and broken so many laptops that my org switched to Linux and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Can't believe the amount of frustration we put up with using Windows for so long.
Maybe for a non tech company yes they cannot navigate anything better due to user expectations, but in my experience those companies usually have support for Mac and at this point I'd rather have that if forced to choose between it and Windows.
And they got that position of dominance more via shady deals and sketchy practices than by producing excellent software. Microsoft has done some good engineering, but that's not what made them what they are.
They haven't supported Office in years. You're only supposed to use the web app version now. And it's not called Office any more, it's called Copilot 365. Not joking.
Product quality has nothing to do with ubiquity. Its all about shady business deals that locks you into products where the migration cost is much higher.
Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.
You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.
You're confusing number of people with percentages. There's still a large share of people who'll pay to use software on windows or android provided your software is good enough. This wrong impression comes from the fact that many users are from 3rd world countries who can't afford anything else. Steam made their entire business selling stuff on windows. And not just proprietary software. Many blender and godot addons are paid and nobody complains. Apart from developing software, where linux and osx are far ahead, in terms of industry software such a autodesk, solidworks, rhino, flstudio, etc, windows is THE platform you want to target of you are planning on monetization. And I'm saying this as a exclusive linux user of 3 years. You know who won't pay money? Linux users. Not out of lack of it, but mostly because of principle of FOSS software. And yes, I'd rather use a inferior FOSS alternative than a slightly better proprietary one
Only small companies here (North EU - Sweden) use Mac + Gsuite + Slack + Zoom as a stack.
Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.
Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...
What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.
Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.
> ... considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.
But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.
The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.
The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.
As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
It cuts both way, because most of Microsoft customers aren't really exposed to anything better, they just believe that this is how it's suppose to be. It's just hard for someone to experience anything better, because Microsoft products are so ubiquitous.
They're ubiquitous because everyone else fucked up during the 80's and 90's charging too much for everything. MS was affordable. It's really just Apple gaining economy of scale by manufacturing in China and Linux being free while being higher quality that make MS look bad.
Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...
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)
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much.
P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel.
Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.
But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
Windows NT kernel is a marvel of engineering. It's incredibly flexible, you can build crazy stuff on top of it without having access to its source code.
As an example, Parallels had a version of Docker-like containers on WINDOWS in 2006! They implemented it as a wrapper on top of the native Windows NT kernel API.
But the downside of this flexibility is relatively slow filesystem operations. It was a conscious trade-off from Windows kernel developers, they thought that flexibility was more important.
> I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid.
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
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.
A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything.
(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
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.
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.
> 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)
My theory is that, at some point they did a good PR job convincing many people that they are good (Maybe they were actually alright for a bit, who knows).
To be honest I too saw them in good light probably since a few years before they bought Github.
They have managed to undo this illusion themselves.
It really became a problem only with Windows RT attempting to merge mobile OS with desktop. All the non-sensical UX compromises are still from that.
Later they abandoned consumerware after losing the mobile space but that's a different story. Microsoft isn't really a consumer software company any more so there's no point judging it on that basis.
I actually went into reading this thinking I'd agree with you that "yeah that's such hyperbole they must have made something good", and to my shock the good things they have shipped they eventually ruined.
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Their list of studio acquisitions over the years is damning. Something must be deeply wrong at Microsoft, because it seems like after one game release worth of time of being under Microsoft, studios become unable to release games in any reasonable amount of time.
Internet Explorer was _better_ than Netscape in the 90-s and the early 2000-s.
Microsoft Office (and especially Excel) was just about perfect around 2003, and only degraded since then. I would argue that Office 2003 is still the best office to this day.
DirectX was a godsend for game developers (up until around 2020 when MS stopped caring about anything).
Looked through it. I'm only considering things while they owned it. For example, Github was pretty good until Microsoft made them migrate to Azure. Uptime has been bad since.
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.
As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great.
I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is.
The whole ecosystem of AD+GPO+ Exchange since 2000 is unparalleled, Novell had something like AD but AD won. That continues with Office 365 where it's not just an office package. It is Identity/accounts/SSO (Entra), MDM (Intune), EDR/"antivirus", Storage (OneDrive), Sharepoint (docs + storage), Teams (Slack + Zoom).
You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I understand if you are a smaller company, then Gsuite + Slack and Zoom is a good choice. But go over 100 people and it starts to not make sense.
I also hear developers liking their IDEs, both full VS and VS Code.
I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
The NT kernel was actually an IBM project, which got divorced from IBM because of contract stuff and Microsoft got to keep a copy. It grew out of VMS which was a heavyweight OS for DEC VAXen, which IBM acquired.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
If you want to read that book I would try and find a second hand copy of the original print. I bought a more recent print from Amazon and it seemed like it was a non-edited OCR'd scan of the original, plenty of words that should have been other similar words, paragraph/page breaks in the middle of pages, and other irregularities.
I enjoyed reading it but would burn this version of the book if I ever got a copy of an original print.
It interesting to see how my kids barely know how computers work, but growning up on DOS, 3.1 and 95, I was basically learning to troubleshoot issues just by trying to us a computer.
