This is mostly immeasurable and unanswerable. They've had lots of good/better tech that's succeeded in the marketplace (Active Directory, DirectX) and hasn't (windows phone 8) for a whole variety of reasons.
They have tech that's solid, but more niche, like .NET/C# which is applied more in the enterprise than internet oriented software. The windows NT kernel is a solid piece of engineering compared to other OSes (it was originally designed/developed by Dave Cutler who came from DEC and did VMS and applied/improved a lot of the concepts there), but has often been hindered by shit thrown on top of it.
Microsoft has done a lot, both good and bad. But a lot of the reasons they're as successful as they are is for the "bad" stuff, like extreme support for backwards compatibility, getting "good enough" to market while other companies languished in perfectionism or distraction (cough cough apple before 2000).
You’re either suffering from confirmation bias or were mistaken about how well they were doing.
Microsoft has been middling for as long as I can remember. They’re not awful, but they’re also not exceptionally good.
They get by on being good enough that it’s easier to use another of their products than to buy in to a better solution.
The outages are somewhat new, but I think in large part because they didn’t host a whole lot a decade ago. They mostly sold software that buyers had to manage.
> The culprit appears to be network infrastructure
Not a lot of the network infrastructure runs on Windows. From previous public statements and information out there, most of Azure's network stack is Linux-based.
> Am I suffering from confirmation bias from HN bubble
If you're in a large corporation, it might not be that easy. I've been at multiple companies that have left AWS due to the fact that Amazon has in other lines of business been a competitor. So we're locked in for reasons that are completely unrelated to technology. It would be so much better if AWS spun off into it's own company.
define easily! if people go all in on Azure they become very deeply entrenched. Granted it is usually something that could be migrated from, but not without a significant cost if you already have a lot of infrastructure on it.
I'll be getting downvoted for it but imho Ms never really cared about creating good software products and has been shoveling (at best) mediocrity through their wildly successful sales channels and through developing a stranglehold on public institutions (vendor lock-in). Azure is just another angle.
I know, but C# is quickly turning into my favorite socially acceptable back end language; and Visual Code is a decent editor, with awesome integrations, another winner.
Fucks sake.
At least Windows is quickly turning into exactly the kind of dumpster fire I would expect.
To my knowledge, they always were between average and terrible, compared to their competitors