NT was Stable what was really missing in the MS world at that time. But a "good" OS? Other than stable I expect to be able to administer HW, fine grained permissions, and lots of out-of-the-box functionality. Compared with a GNU/Linux of the time, I have never hesitated in going for Linux (or FreeBSD at the time).
Sure, if you ignore all the anticompetitive bullshit they pulled to blackmail high street stores into removing BeOS, DrDOS, Linux and others from their shelves.
And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs.
Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves.
Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4.
Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports.
Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play.
Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML
Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”.
Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s
It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS.
In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition.
Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of.
Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!
They are very good at talking to businesses but even more important was their installed base. As they used to say "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
They won because they were first mover, not because they were the best because they weren't and they aren't. This is why they are so hell bent on copilot everywhere. They want to build an installed base again so they can milk it. But they're hardly the best. In fact what they are selling as copilot isn't even anything they made. It's just Chatgpt. Another interesting parallel with edge by the way which is of course just chrome.
They weren’t the first movers. They just managed to get IBM to sign with them after BASIC proved not to be IBMs long term version and CP/M struck out from any disk OS talks (though stories differ about exactly how that interaction went)
Microsoft didn’t even have an OS when they made that deal with IBM.
Hence why I said they’re good at negotiating with businesses.
Being first to market is actually less important than people think it is. It’s just history tends to remember the victors so everyone assumes they were first to market.
It was also the last operating system from Microsoft that didn't require activation.
It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.
Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.