Hehehe... yah. I've been on a career-long love/hate abusive codependent relationship with Brother Bill's Travelling Salvation Show.
Though, I gotta admit. Windows XP is just plain the single most solid OS ever made, especially considering the myriad of platforms and vagueries of millions of peripherals they have to support. And I'm an original Macintosh devotee. It really was quite an accomplishment.
And as good as the Novell Directory Service was, I couldn't wait to dump Netware for Windows NT (then, v. 3.51). Sure, Active Directory is a total ripoff of what NDS was doing ten years ago... but AD is ~administrable~ in ways that NDS itself was always just a total PITA.
It could be said that Novell's only problem is that they were just a little too early on the curve. Novell could have ~owned~ networking if only they'd not been so good at something that could so obviously be made easier, and they failed at the interface level. The early iterations of NT were way sub-par to Netware's deeper features, but they were not just easier to use, they were easier to tie back to other legacy systems. Slam, bang, done. Netware is out and NT 3.51 is in.
NT 4.0 was a really competent follow-on to 3.51 and it sealed the deal.
When you consider the tens of thousands of applications, the combinations of hardware and software are mind-boggling. And it sorta works most of the time.
I don't worship at the feet of Microsoft, but I don't see anybody spending billions of dollars to build a better operating system mousetrap.
Microsoft has really standardized things and, Linux-worshippers aside, that's pretty much a good thing. I can help my grandmother debug her computer, get files from anyone anywhere, and go from one job to another without having to spend a week just learning their computers. And that's cool.
It's also Friday and that's cooler.