If anything, that's a trend that's accelerated and increased since then. Microsoft was the brand you had to use, not the one you wanted to use. It was familiar, but that can, as is said, breed contempt. Microsoft's direct consumers since the late 1980s have largely been OEMs and corporate CTOs / CIOs, not its end-users, and when it's tried direct mass-market products, it's failed hugely.
It's last significant unalloyed mass-market success was really Windows 95, and even that benefited largely from the utter unsuitability of alternatives: Windows 3.11, Apple (at its nadir and very nearly dead), Linux (far too techy). BeOS, Amiga, or OS/2 might have presented a preferable alternative, but Microsoft fought extremely hard to ensure that could not happen.
No, it's not just the techies.
Outside of gaming and partisans, Microsoft has really lost its brand.