UNIX variants, OS/2, and the BSDs were the options at the time for decent networking...Mac OS wasn't in the running.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
IIRC, almost everything Windows 3.11 had out of the box was already present on Macs for ages. Shared printers, p2p file servers, instant messaging (that was an add-on) and more. And better - it all just worked.
I remember that, at the time, the e-mail client/server that came with 3.11 was nice and I don't remember anything like that on Macs, but, with that exception, System 7 was orders of magnitude better than 3.11.