It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.
Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.
Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.
This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.
Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.
I agree, 11 definitely was shitty from the beginning.
With 11 Microsoft are not even attempting to “sell” the operating system anymore, but instead are dragging people to it kicking and screaming, while they desperately try to cling to Windows 10.
Tells you everything you need to know about whether it’s the consumer or Microsoft who are on the winning side of that “upgrade”.