Realistically, what "great products" has MS produced? From my perspective, MS has always been vastly better at winning the market because they're nearly always competing with inferior products.
They are at least mature products. I've worked on kernel code in Sun product, linux and Windows. And Windows was the only one done professionally, with mature complete APIs and some kind of design.
linux was the least mature. The kernel was a maze, there were 3 similar-but-fatally-different APIs for modules depending on where you graft them in (app, loadable driver, kernel driver), only 1 model of memory mapping was supported. And the code quality was very low. Nearly identical complete methods for trivial differences in argument (instead of calling common code). The same variable names used in different places for very, very different things (e.g. 'page' used for a page table entry, a page table pointer, a page directory pointer, a page directory, a page directory entry...) Spaghetti style code paths.
A large company like MS may have no coherent ethics or direction. But they have Lots of resources to actually, completely, exhaustively complete a code module with everything tested and in place.
So the products may not be great, or apply perfectly to solve your problem. Consider we're developers and our problems are pretty not much on MS's mind anyway. But they are responsibly coded and completed, which is a big thing.
A non-exhaustive list of great MSFT products (I work for Google, no pro-MSFT bias here beyond a dash of meta-contrarianism):
* Windows 95
* Windows XP
* Windows 7
* Office 2010
* Zune HD
* Windows Phone 7
* XBox
* XBox 360
* Mice and keyboards
I'm sure I'm forgetting tons of stuff. Before you start pointing out minor bugs or flaws in these products, or making irrelevant arguments (e.g. "Zune HD had low market share"), remember that Google products aren't perfect either. Google Docs has no equation editor (Word does). Android sucks as an mp3 player compared to Windows Phone 7. I can't play Starcraft 2 on Chrome OS. Etc.
Win 95? Really? Not Windows 98 with the plus pack? Not Windows 2000?
The Office suite collectively is impressive, and I've loved some features. Getting a better replacement for Excel and some of the other features is important, and I'm pleased to see Libre Office moving towards that.
You don't mention the killer combination of Exchange and Outlook. As far as I know[1] there's no real competitor to that combination, and that's something that has kept many offices[2] locked into an MS ecosystem.
[1] Happy to be shown wrong. Last time I really looked was several years ago. It's have to include calendaring / scheduling like Outlook. Yes, I know that having Exchange facing the Internet has been disastrous for some versions.
[2] Rightly or wrongly, many people did get locked into MS Small Business Server because of the Exchange / Outlook combo, and because they didn't know any better. There's a solid niche for a similar but better and cheaper setup. You'd monetise by selling cheaper than MS and selling support, but having decent customer led support too.
>Win 95? Really? Not Windows 98 with the plus pack? Not Windows 2000?
I was thinking of the OSes they released that were big leaps forward for their vast numbers of users. IIRC Win 98 was only an incremental improvement on 95. But I could be wrong; in 1998 I was 12 years old.
