TBH, you could change a few terms and that text wouldn't look much different in the 90's. Microslop never gave a shit on end-users and what they think. Nobody ever "liked" Microslop. People were always complaining that Windows is shit, Office is shit, MS Servers are a joke, etc. Nobody at Microslop ever cared. They always cared only about having all the companies and governments in ransom, which was always their golden egg goose. The only other thing they care about, to make the first thing happen, are developers. They put a lot money into keeping people developing using their tech, and this actually works. Even on Linux it's hard to avoid Miroslop tech. (I've got just today a Pipewire update which pulled in some MS libs for ML; and there is for sure more as they have even code in the Kernel.) Microslop's EEE strategy is a long game, which is actually pretty hard to beat.

Your circles are really small and echo-chamber-y.

Office was considered a very solid product for many generations. Windows 95 was loved. So were Windows 2000, Windows XP with the SPs, Windows 7, Windows 10.

.NET was the envy of the Java world for many years.

Microsoft had many duds but they also had some great products.

You can't sell as many products as they did without also having some good products.