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Notes -
Come on man -- MS products (other than their OS I suppose) were cutting edge in the 80s/90s and dominated the ecosystem for good reasons. There was also a brief period in and around when they started rolling out the Win10 preview versions (2010-ish?) where it seemed like they were genuinely making progress in dealing with the technical debt and adding interesting functionality; not sure how well the decline since then tracks with I.I., but the correlation does seem to exist.
But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln....
They had a decent word processor for a while. Excel just embraced-extended-and-extinguished Lotus, though.
Lotus was definitely the market pioneer, but they failed to effectively move the product forward and were looking quite obsolete by the late 80s or so as I recall -- Excel changed the game about like Lotus had done ten years before, and they were adding useful functionality that was unavailable elsewhere until... probably the early 2000s? Office 2K was pretty good as I recall, and didn't really significantly improve again until maybe 2012 -- which falls into the hopefully looking period that I'm proposing quite nicely.
Now of course they are just bungling around trying to replace vba with Javascript for some reason -- was somebody challenged to implement a worse scripting language than vba, or is it that Indians really like Javascripting All The Things? Big questions...
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