I believe Windows did a lot of things right by just keeping things simple for developers. I use the clipboard to transfer large blobs of data from one program to another when doing exploratory programming -- it's a lot quicker than creating file formats for everything. Of course there's the risk of losing it in the process.

Another under-appreciated Windows feature is how they implement drag-and-drop apps. When you drag a file into an app icon, it just stuffs the file path into the command line arguments and runs the app. In contrast, though MacOS introduced drag-and-drop, actually implementing it in System 7 was a huge complex chore.