They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products.

Windows NT was one of them. Up to Windows XP the products were pretty solid and each had visible improvement against the previous one.

Their language products were/are still solid IMO. Maybe Visual Studio is sluggish, but we can still use an older version if we want. Plus they put a lot of effort optimizing VSCode, too.

Even back in the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows days, when things broke down quite easily, I think they still provide the best bang for individual users and developers. There was no competitors who could provide so much value back then.