Here's a list of MS software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software
You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Microsoft Office (and especially Excel) was just about perfect around 2003, and only degraded since then. I would argue that Office 2003 is still the best office to this day.
DirectX was a godsend for game developers (up until around 2020 when MS stopped caring about anything).
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.