This is shocking for me to hear because it is the exact opposite of my experience/memory. I recall Microsoft briefly being the cool place for geniuses to work before it quickly became the big bad evil monopolist. Maybe this perception was exacerbated by my hanging out in more open-source-friendly corners of the internet.

I know they’ve changed their tune on open source but it’s really hard for me to break from my 20+-year perception that they are the evil company that makes awful software.

Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution.

The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.

Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective?

Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson.

Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project.

Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.

Amiga is famous for being loved by it's users in the 80s. I think Apple II users and Commodore 64 users kind of loved them too.

But expectations were much lower then, computers were expected to be a thing for a 'hobbyist' to tinker with, and those who did generally did it because they loved it.

(I still don't think what were then called "PCs" running MS-DOS or (beginning in 1985) Windows were as beloved as Amiga or Commodore 64 though, Microsoft-OS PCs were for "business", and nobody really loved them).

(Macintosh was first sold in 1984, so mid-80s was the first Macintosh).

Visual studio was very not great around 2010. I especially hated the widespread divergence from language specifications and the choice to use a different compiler front end for GUI feedback vs generating code, so you'd get errors in one and not the other. My colleagues claimed it used to be worse.

Microsoft's developer experience was great. MSDN CDs were full of valuable info, utilities, and pre-release APIs you won't find elsewhere. MS Visual Studio was (and still is) an exemplar of well-though-out, super-powerful IDE. MS developer docs were pretty thorough.

OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality.

To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive.

Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well.

MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least.

Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.

> developer support was pretty awesome

It was truly amazing. MSDN on CDs.

In the 90's and aughts there was very little love for Microsoft among IT professionals.

It's a little embarrassing to think about right now when you realize that Microsoft has never poisoned a river or sent thugs with billy clubs to bust a union, and so all of us had bigger fish to fry. But there was never love.

I don't think you're wrong but it's also fair to say that Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux and open source in general. They were literally funding legal attacks open source software. They were also engaged in a ton of anti-competitive behavior. Gates was a very smart guy and was absolutely a ruthless corporate terminator which is easy to forget given how he acts and spends his time/money today. And the Microsoft of today still engages in questionable or shitty behavior but regulators are even softer now than they were then. So Teams gets bundled for free with 365 after Slack proves there's a market.

Teams does send me back down memory lane with a good old fashioned 2 minutes hate for Microsoft every day.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Microsoft represented an existential threat to many, many parts of the IT ecosystem every bit as real as dumping toxic waste into salmon breeding grounds.

Microsoft was one of the most ruthless orgs in tech history. They destroyed anyone within eyesight of their goals with wild abandon. To this day I have a hard time trusting/believing anything coming out of that org. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to wake tomorrow to GitHub being accessible only from the most expensive visual studio license available (and required to be running on the most expensive Windows license available).

> Microsoft was one of the most ruthless orgs in tech history.

MS is like a boxer who doesn’t just want to beat you in the ring. He wants to outright kill you too so you will never fight again.

I think people loved their products but hated their monopolistic pricing.

But that's what software cost. If you weren't paying Microsoft hundreds of dollars for a compiler you were paying Green Hills. Or you were paying a Unix vendor thousands of dollars for an operating system on expensive proprietary hardware. Etc.