It’s been unsuccessful at building high-quality, user-facing products. Which is where I was going with the analogy. The US makes plenty of money too, but falls short in building things you can point to.
I own an iPhone. It’s as buggy as Microsoft products. In the end, Microsoft products are Okay. The reason people criticize Microsoft is politics. First you decide which side is the right one (that’s easy, it’s Linux) and then you use Bad Faith to make the wrong side look as bad as possible.
The bad side of MS was pretty bad with SCO case and VFAT patents and OfficeXML.
I have no dislike of Microsoft as a company. But its products and its ability to execute suck. We deployed Office 365 at work and all the rewritten apps are total crap (Outlook, Teams, etc.) They can’t even manage to maintain their own browser engine, which is pathetic for such a large company. I have a surface Duo 2, which is a promising device that’s just a total disaster in execution. The Surface line is sometimes good, but the execution is so bad. They have no ability to sync up with Intel release cycles, so the hardware is perpetually six months to a year old when new surface models are released.