It was if you pretend anything before service pack 1 didn't happen, I saw so many infected machines back then it wasn't even funny. And I guess the more professional users saw it as a downgrade from Windows 2000.
It really was. If MS had refined it instead of developing vista etc. I probably wouldnt have felt the need to move to Linux when I did. It would have been a curiosity that I would have run in a vm instead of my main OS. But MS couldnt help themselves so here we are almost 20 years after I abandoned windows.
Its funny you say that because their stock price took until 2012 to recover to where it was before the dot com crash. Stuffing money into your couch cushions would have been a better investment strategy. Since then, microsoft's stock price growth isnt even in the top 10 of tech stocks. It got beaten by a company that has less than a tenth the marketshare. Which is especially funny since microsoft has had a defacto monopoly in the pc market and they still cant leverage it.