Also...
Windows 7, .NET, Visual Studio, Office 2007 (Ribbon overhaul), WP7 (though a way to come yet, but tends to get good reviews, particularly for the UI).
Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.
VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work.
[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.
That size of codebase is definitely an issue :) Last time I had 500k of C#+C++ (5 years ago roughly), I split the solution into around 20 solutions, and used binary dependencies (with CruiseControl.Net on top of that [1]).
I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too).
That looks painful. I'd rather like to move it to an SOA and split it into logical feature partitions and use service composition and windows workflow to integrate it all. Typically, I don't think anyone wants to pay for that though.
I should have made it clearer that I wasn't trying to disprove your greater point, only clarify that one division of Microsoft does make good, very popular stuff.
Their products were "bad" (overpriced and mostly technically inferior.)
I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.
Apart from:
(and controversially, perhaps now, sadly, no longer developed)