Uses =/= being good. Arguably especially for Microsoft, they're the anti-thesis of each other.

Gamers use Windows because (until recently, and even still only in specific contexts) you need Windows to game properly. Thankfully between things like the Proton framework and broader support for Mac and Linux gaming, that's starting to change.

People in business and government use Windows because Apple has never prioritized the Enterprise environment in MacOS, and it shows. And to be honest thank fuck, otherwise MacOS might be as bad as Windows is now.

A whole lot of regular people use Windows at home, because it's just the default and you can get PC's for dirt cheap (pre-tariffs anyway) that come preinstalled with it. However that market is eroding as people go full time on smartphones for general computing and computers become less relevant overall.

I'm not saying Windows is going away, the inertia is incredible there and I suspect they'll continue trotting along, being mediocre and pissing off everyone continuously because that's really what they've always done. But let us not pretend financial success in the market is in any way an indicator of a good product. Like evolution, markets do not select for "the best" they select for "the okayest" and Windows is very much the okayest OS.

Everybody uses Microsoft, because they have to. Not because they love it or even like it.

That's the root cause of why the stores failed.

Think about it: how many people openly say that they love to use Apple products vs people who openly say they love Microsoft products?

I have never ever heard anybody say/write about a great Microsoft product.

I write all of this as someone who uses Windows, Teams and other Microsoft crap every day all day.

Excel is one example of a product that is well liked and considered extremely valuable by some people. Azure (if that’s still the name for their aws competitor) is also reasonably well liked from what I can tell. Certainly it seemed they were beating gcp by having a product people liked more.

As someone that works with large AWS, GCP, AliCloud, and Azure footprints I can assure you that Azure is god awful in every single aspect.

Especially, but not limited to, support.

Excel was feature complete in the 90s. Everything added since has made it worse. I have 12 cores and it takes as long as it did to merely startup as in 1995.

Launching Excel 2010 is bliss compared to all newer versions. But lambda and let can be magical.

And Alt-Q to find Excel features is kinda good. There's usually a short annoying delay while Excel activates the feature. And once it returns results, it never places the keyboard focus on the first result, so you always have to down-arrow instead of just pressing enter to accept the first result.

The improved table naming and array functions seem pretty important. The flash full feature also seems quite useful.

You never learned to use the features added since 1995. That’s the problem.

Microsoft's market size is built around legacy, IT, and PC Gaming. Yet I know people in IT that will not run Microsoft at home, just in a corporate environment. Stock does not equate to quality product. Microsoft is trillion dollar company that makes some of the worst User Experience products.

I find the user experience with Microsoft products to be bad. They continually have inconsistencies with their shortcut key bindings. Example would be Ctrl+F, find something but in Outlook it forwards and email. Visual Studio has numerous bad user experiences that they choose not to fix. Example is you cannot stash individual files in GIT, it is all or nothing. Only way around is GIT via terminal environment. It is 2025 and Visual Studio still cannot display source code in Vertical and Horizontal at the same time, one or the other. VSCode has had this feature forever. You have to pay me to use Microsoft software.

I don't need to use spreadsheets so Excel has no value to me. If a spreadsheet is needed, it is the most basic and LibreOffice works just fine. Only reason I use Outlook is because of IT. I don't even use Word and use MarkDown with PDF generators, plain text, or LaTex for documentation.

Microsoft had to universally disable Registry backups via a Windows 10 Update because they sold Surface laptops with low storage. Registry backups where filling up the hard-drive. These are the ones trying to compete against Google's Chromebooks.

WINE / Proton is displacing Windows in the PC gaming market. It actually gives users a better experience in some instances. Example would be that shaders can be compiled without running the game. Windows Direct X implementation will only compile shaders while the game is running. This will lower the FPS and has known to cause stuttering during first play through.

I will never install Windows OS on any of my computers ever again. The OS keeps getting worse and worse with newer versions. I've reached a point where if I need Windows OS the game / software is not desired and no money will change hands. I also will no longer buy a desktop or laptop that forces Windows to be purchased too. If there is ever a reason I need Window it will be installed as a VM.

The only application from Microsoft I will most likely use is VSCode and I'm trying to replace it with Zed and other tooling.

There is no argument people don't use Microsoft. The argument is the products coming out of Microsoft are low quality. Still waiting on Azure's feature to delete a GIT pull request in case sensitive information was accidentally pushed to the repository [0]. Microsoft truly does not respect the end user. You can see this with their forced bloat-ware such as Cortana, XBox features, and Recall, and user request never ending request to remove these useless / unused features.

Don't worry, their stock will go up as they push more advertisements onto the desktop for Home users. Investors love such trash.

[0] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Allow-deletion...