I've been working with .NET, Xamarin, and Azure for a while. Those Microsoft products really are a pleasure, I have very little to complain about. Shame that it's only these 3 MS products that justify that statement.

I must say .net is a bit of an exception in this sad sight of microsoft's decay. Pretty much everything they have done in the past 3 years in the .net space makes sense and is nice to Microsoft's customers (open sourcing .net, finally delivering on platform-independence, visual studio community being pretty much a complete and fully functional IDE, buying and making xamarin free, etc).

For the other divisions. Windows has become an absolute shit show. Every time I go on the Azure portal I get lost. My xbox one is blowing like a leaf blower. They stopped developing Office 15 years ago (ah no, they changed the color from blue to green) and my surface pro is reminding me of my Windows 98 BSOD days.

Ha not, their mouses are still pretty decent.

If they start annoying the developers they are lost. So they don't do stupid things there. But it looks like they never cared or plain stopped caring for the end users.

What they want is to go to developers and say "Look, we have millions of users, cross platform(PC/Phone/XBOX), and great developer tools. All you need is to develop for Windows 10 and forget those other platforms". And they think they can just force 1 & 2 which may actually be true...

Personally I had a horrible experience with Azure. It seems they spent too much time on the UI and too little time on making it usable to understand billing. I was amazed billing could be worse from Amazon.

I used their IaaS which was a pain to setup and constantly rebooted but maybe that's just because of Windows which is pretty problematic to begin with...

Xamarin is hardly a MS product, and they shut down RoboVM pretty much immediately after purchasing Xamarin.

I've never thought much or Microsoft's PR or marketing. Not to the public at least. There's no coherent brand unlike Apple and Google and they still can't shake the haters and this is just another reason to hate.

To enterprise and devs the likes of Scott Hanselman do a brilliant job but they seem to be fighting against MS's bad tendencies.

MCP=Microsoft Certified Peddler

Marketing is what they are, and always have been, best at. They still overwhelmingly dominate despite the worst efforts of the last 2 CEOs.

Reminds of the days when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".