That Microsoft comment is both trite and undeserved. Microsoft doesn't particularly sell "garbage"; no, it undercuts application vendors for its platform, copies their products, delivers a freebie/cheap knockoff to the market to compete with them and drive them out, but works very hard to improve it as time goes.
Microsoft is evil but it's not incompetent. Sometimes it even puts its market dominance to good use; MS whipped hardware vendors into shape and gave us a truly uniform PC platform with Plug and Play.
Also, many Microsoft products are actually quality products. The few bad apples give the rest a bad name (also, some of the 3rd party apps give Windows in general a bad name).
Agreed. The UI for the desktop just gives me a headache but there are some really cool projects coming out of Redmond. There is some really interesting work in computational photography:
Microsoft is evil but it's not incompetent. Sometimes it even puts its market dominance to good use; MS whipped hardware vendors into shape and gave us a truly uniform PC platform with Plug and Play.