Good joke. MS has always been in the 'incompetent evil' quadrant, Newcomers just keep inexplicably giving them the benefit of the doubt or assuming/insisting they've "changed".
No, not really. They were seen as a serious business used by other serious businesses. IMO google pioneered the "cool tech company" with their 20% time, "don't be evil", unique campus life, etc.
I remember people commenting "never seen such a thing before, for a computer OS!"
"Many electronics stores held midnight launches for the product, with thousands of people waiting in line to be the first to get their hands on the operating system.
The release was a tremendous success. Microsoft sold 7 million copies in the first five weeks, and Windows 95 was soon the most popular operating system on the market."
I know that at that time I used to be like "what kind of pleb uses anything other than Windows? Get off your high horse and use the OS that actually works", because well... Windows XP was pretty good, and games worked on it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html