[frik]

1998 was still a great year in Windows world. In 1999 the DotNet vision made lot's of things kind of legacy - kind of, because despite all odds Win32 and shell32/Explorer are still thriving where as DotNet Framework is now officially legacy tech. And UWP hasn't caught on, as mobile is dead end for MS and their Store is incredible bad.

True Visual Studio was really great. And like many, one had a VS6 and VB6 install still around. Even if VS6 C++ is really outdated nowadays, it doesn't contain this spy-home feature that shipper with VS 2015 and VCredist 2015 (RTM, patch 1, patch 2). Back in the 1990s MS was a good company.

[hvs]

"Back in the 1990s MS was a good company."

Umm, isn't that precisely the period when they were charged with antitrust violations? Such a short memory we have.

[SamUK96]

I think the OPs context for "good company" is "good company _for coders/hackers_". You can have a company behaving in an anti-trustworthy way, but their software still be _good_.

Also, their antitrust violations was due to the Windows OS and anti-competitive behaviours, if i'm not mistaken? If so, then this is not really relevant to their software or OP's post, but more their business approach of locking out competition, which is a question of legality and economics.

[hvs]

Part of the anti-competitive behaviors were anti-Linux and open source which I feel is "bad for coders".

http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/

[huhtenberg]

> Back in the 1990s MS was a good company.

It really wasn't.