Word for Windows almost certainly supported embedded videos. WordPerfect for Windows certainly did, and I seem to recall it being based upon OLE (a Microsoft technology). This was in the Windows 3.1 era.
> ... but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.
The answer is truly an, "it depends." Some modern software is much more powerful. Other software feels like a throwback to the 8-bit era with a shimmering veneer. I used to think that this was a product of web and mobile development effectively forcing developers to start again from scratch, but I am starting to believe that most modern developers lack the ability to implement features that aren't provided by a framework.
Don't get me started on icons. Icons, if anything, have gotten progressively worse somehow with more resolution and colors. It's almost like the reduced color palette caused more sudden color transitions and communicated the icon's purpose back in the day.
Which might have underpinned material design... but that entire movement, at least its major expressions (e.g. Windows 8/x) is an utter disaster.
Sure they didn't scale as much or have embedded video, but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.
The massive horsepower gains are REALLY noticeable in the evolution of games. But outside of that in "productivity"... ye gods we are wasting horsepower to basically do the same crap we used to do.
What is really really exasperating is when any app freezes for multiple seconds. I start counting 4 billion... 8 billion... 12 billion (assuming 4 billion instructions per second). How does that happen with having 1000x the horsepower?
And the RAM we waste these days. Windows ran in 4 MB! And 16GB is too small these days for development?
Moore's law is dying. Software stacks need to start optimizing themselves.