I haven't praised Windows for a long time but even I have to admit Windows for Workgroups made small office networks useful, that Windows on 386 was a nice (not OS/2 nice, but nice still) way to multitask MS-DOS programs and that Windows NT was a very decent desktop OS if you had the hardware it required. My first multi-processor computer ran Windows and, at the time, I wouldn't be able to install Linux on it. Solaris would be an option, but it was expensive, difficult to install and required careful selection of compatible hardware.

Of course, other OSs have surpassed it and Windows now looks like an evolutionary dead-end, crushed by layers of legacy compatibility and unable to evolve in significant new directions.

In the 90's, having a Windows gaming machine was cool.

Between 95 and XP there was a period of "What's next?" similar to Apple in the 2007-2012 time frame and Google in the 2002-2007 time frame. What made them cool was the ability to change the way we work and play.