"a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web."

There is revisionist history, and then there is that statement. That statement ... is almost offensive.

... Why did the "golden age" end? Because Microsoft sucked in so so so so so so so many ways. That statement is a bald faced lie, a whitewashing attempt to forgive Microsoft from inflicting millions of man years in damage to the IT industry over three decades of anticompetitive practices to keep their substandard software in a position of market dominance.

But for anyone beyond the MCSE factory programmer (aka NOT the thought leaders of the industry) aside from those profiting handsomely from the Microsoft evil empire, did not like Microsoft.

In the days of DOS, you had DOS or UNIX. Which was better?

In the days of Windows in the 3.1 and even pretty much in the windows 95, you didn't have preemptive multitasking (something that non-windows had for 20 years at that point). It crashed CONSTANTLY, had no security, required restarts for practically anything that was installed.

Meanwhile the UNIX people would brag about machines not being rebooted for years. This was before the constant patch cycle was a thing.

Microsoft's apis were slapdash and disorganized, and frequently went out of favor.

During this time Microsoft would constantly crush and screw over competitors and engage in constant anticompetitive behavior. If you didn't suck on the teat of Microsoft, your platform was under unrelenting assault, not by pure technical achievement, but by the full smorgasborg of corporate dirty tricks, FUD, bribery/kickbacks, lobbying, lies, secret apis, golf schmoozing with nontechnical CIOs to close deals, no or undermined standards, etc.

The graveyard is long: Sybase, Lotus 123, Netscape, Novell.

The Microsoft times were a time of being stuck with one option: and OS that crashed constantly or is utterly porous to attackers. A browser that has incompatible web apis and a disbanded developer team (IE 6) that gets corporate mandated and is a thorn in your side in the entire IT stack for two decades. Databases stolen from companies (Sybase signed SUCH a bad deal, it astonishes me to this day) running on platforms that can't stay up. Office software with inaccessible file formats and byzantine and closed programmatic apis for accessing it. A substandard desktop UI.

If you used Microsoft software with an ounce of historical knowledge or awareness, you could see the prison. You had no practical choices. All the executives in your company were bought and paid for. Microsoft had sales forces that tracked non-Microsoft systems and targeted them within companies by any means necessary. Every new piece of software written in MIcrosoft had to pay the "sociopath management tax" and go through extensive reviews on how it could be used to further or maintain Microsoft's empire and control.

Their software was deliberately dumped in beta form onto the market to crowd out the competitors.

None of this is an "adolescent" attitude. I'll repeat myself: MILLIONS OF MAN HOURS OF DAMAGE. You know, probably billions. Decades x tens of millions of workers.

This isn't just IT programmer frustration. This is bad applications forced on non-programmer users. This is better companies, better software, better IT industry denied proper funding and profits. Instead, Microsoft took trillions of dollars in revenues from them. This is undermining a free market, free ideas, and freedom for Microsoft's profit.